Tostadas de Tasajo

This is Oaxaca. Valles Centrales, specifically. The 20 de Noviembre market in Oaxaca City, where the pasillo de carnes runs the length of the building and the smoke from a dozen charcoal grills hangs in the air from morning until the last customer leaves. That is where the tostada de tasajo lives.

Tasajo is thinly sliced, salt-cured beef. Not jerky. Not carne seca from the north. Tasajo is cut so thin you can nearly see through it, salted lightly, and grilled fast over charcoal until the edges crisp and the center stays tender. The women at those market stalls have been grilling tasajo on the same parrillas for decades. They don't time it. They watch the meat. When the edges curl and the fat renders, it comes off the fire. Thirty seconds too long and you have shoe leather.

The tostada underneath is fried in oil until it holds its shape like a plate. The black beans are refried in manteca, because in Oaxaca the beans are black and the fat is lard. The salsa is made from chile pasilla oaxaqueno, the smoked chile that exists nowhere else in Mexico, ground with garlic and nothing more. And the queso fresco on top is the soft, crumbly kind from the Tlacolula market, not the block you find vacuum-sealed at a supermarket.

My mother didn't make tasajo. She was jalisciense. But when I first traveled to Oaxaca in my twenties and sat at a market stall with a tostada de tasajo in front of me, I understood something. Every state guards its own ingredients, its own cuts of meat, its own chiles. Cada estado, su propia cocina. The pasilla oaxaqueno on that tostada tasted like nothing I had eaten in Mexico City. Smoky, deep, with a heat that builds slowly. I wrote the name in my notebook and underlined it twice.