Tasajo Asado al Comal con Salsa de Molcajete

This is Oaxaca's breakfast. Not the city. The state. From the Valles Centrales to the Istmo de Tehuantepec, tasajo is the cut that defines the morning table, sold by the kilo in the pasillos de carnes at the Central de Abastos and grilled over coals at the Mercado 20 de Noviembre, where the smoke from a hundred comales hangs in the air before the sun is fully up.

Tasajo is beef from the leg, butterflied open in long, thin sheets by carniceros who have been making the same cut since they were teenagers. The meat is salted and left to cure overnight, sometimes hung on lines in the open air, sometimes laid flat on wooden boards in the back of the stall. The salt draws out moisture, concentrates the beef flavor, and gives the surface that particular dry grip that lets it char on a screaming-hot comal in under two minutes. You do not marinate tasajo. You do not season it with anything beyond salt. The cure is the preparation. The comal does the rest.

The salsa that belongs next to this meat is ground in a molcajete, not blended. Chile pasilla oaxaqueño, the smoky dried chile that grows nowhere else in Mexico with quite the same character, roasted alongside tomatoes and garlic on the same comal that will cook the meat. You pound it by hand until the texture is rough, uneven, alive with bits of charred skin and seeds. A blender salsa is smooth. A molcajete salsa has texture and a deeper flavor because the stone crushes the oils out of the chile and the garlic in a way that blades cannot. This is one of the times I will not tell you the blender works fine. It doesn't. Use the molcajete.

My mother's notebook has a page labeled 'Oaxaca, mercado' with a sketch of how the carnicero butterflied the tasajo, a single spiral cut that unrolls the muscle into a sheet the size of a newspaper page. She wrote underneath: 'La sal hace todo el trabajo.' The salt does all the work. She was right.