If you eat here, you and your taste buds will eventually have a showdown with a habanero chili. Perhaps this is something you look forward to, perhaps it is something you fear. In either case, it is inevitable, as the habanero chili is a crucial element in Yucatecan cuisine.

Being of the tribe of humans that likes hot and spicy food, we welcomed our relationship to the habanero from the beginning and have seen that relationship deepen over time. We’ve learned that a yellow or orange habanero has been allowed to ripen on the plant a little longer, and that five times out of six (but not always!), the orange and yellow ones are hotter than the green ones. We’ve learned that much of the heat that habanero is packing is stored in the seeds, so we’ve learned to scrape those away. We have fond memories of habaneros in far-off pueblos, picked fresh from kitchen gardens and served immediately next to a home-cooked meal.

We’ve learned to love the habanero in a multitude of ways. We chop a few green and yellow chilis into tiny pieces and put it in our guacamole. We cut it in half and swirl it around in our frijoles con puerco or in our sopa de lima. We add chopped habanero to our shrimp ceviche and we find it difficult to eat any sort of taco without fresh habanero salsa… it just doesn’t taste right. And eating cochinita pibil without habanero salsa dripped generously over the top is like driving a car with three wheels… it’s out of balance and it just doesn’t take you to the desired destination.

Where does eating habanero chili take us, you ask? To another place, por supuesto.

Those of us who enjoy those foods that can be labeled picante will tell you that hot foods encourage endorphins. And endorphins come running when they hear habanero call. Chomp down on even a quarter of a habanero and suddenly the lights are brighter, time slows to a crawl (…when WILL it stop hurting?) and space changes dimension. Everything seems farther away from you and your tongue, which has suddenly become the center of the Universe.

First, you keep eating because the best cure for the habanero burn, it seems, is more habanero. After a few bites, you realize the folly of that idea, and turn to an ice-cold drink. The fizz of a Coca Cola burns a little more, but the temperature is oh-so-right. Milky horchata goes down smoothly and seems to have promise. Both provide relief that is both sweet and short. And really, what’s the point? You have to finish your tacos.

When your total habanero intake is finished, it’s time to just sit and Be The Burn. It’s Buddha Time… Be Hot Now. Just Do It. Well, really, you have no choice but to sit it out, eyes tearing and nose running. So, since you have no choice (you made your choice awhile ago and now you have to live with it…), you might as well enjoy it.

When you turn that philosophical corner, when you learn to Accept the Pain, Go with the Pain, Embrace the Pain…  then the Pain blooms like a fat red rose, filling your mouth with increasing, pulsing energy. You can feel it radiate through your cheeks, down your neck, across the table, out into the street and up into the sky. You are the pain. You are the street. You are the sky. Yes, you are the Universe! The sun burns brightly in the sky, but not as bright as you. You hear George Harrison playing Chili In The Sky With Diamonds on the sitar and you see blue-skinned gods floating on clouds, smiling knowingly as you fly by.

At some point, you start to notice so-called normal things again. You notice that you aren’t eating alone and that you have hands and feet. You start to hear traffic noise and the voice of your companion. You remember that you have an appointment at four o’clock. Your habanero high noon is over.

Welcome back to consensual reality.

Let’s Talk History
Apparently, someone somewhere has now proven that the chili pepper was first domesticated on the Yucatan Peninsula. In the first place, we propose that they did not need scientific research to tell that fact to anybody who lives in Yucatan and, in the second place, you cannot domesticate chili peppers anyway… if you try, they will bite you back. We have been bitten by chili peppers repeatedly but, like most humans, we believe we can eventually burn out enough taste buds to  win the contest with these little green terrorists of the human pallet.

Silly humans.

This is Healthy?
As for the health food benefits of capsaicin (the chemical component that makes chilies hot), yes – it is an antioxidant. There are no studies, as yet, proving how much one would have to eat in order to obtain the anti-cancer benefits of capsaicin, but, hey! Knock yourself out!

Where capsaicin is beginning to shine is in its use in pain-relieving creams. We’re not sure why putting something that burns on your skin makes the pain in your joints go away, but that’s what they claim.

On the other end of the spectrum, research now links excessive exposure to capsaicin to gastric cancer, then qualifies that with suggesting that one would have to work in a factory, grinding peppers to dust on a daily basis for a lifetime and without a mask, in order for one’s gastric cancer to be precipitated by excessive exposure to capsasin. Since that probably isn’t what you are doing here in the Yucatan, you probably don’t need to worry about that.

Local lore has it that if you eat habanero and lime with everything, you probably won’t get sick. Between the heat of the chili and the acid of the lime, any bacteria that might hurt you will be rendered senseless and ineffective before it reaches your stomach.

We invite you to notice how many local foods are served with habanero and lime…

DNA Proves Origin
Now, about how Yucatan won the contest for the prehistoric home of domesticated chili peppers! The best way to explain this is using football as an example (yes, it’s a first. Yucatan Living is using a sport metaphor!). Team A (that’s us – Yucatan! Yay!) and Team B (Central Mexico, to our southwest) both domesticated chili peppers at approximately the same time and independently of each other. But one had to be first.

How would you decide the winner in football? Same number of games. Same number of wins and losses. Same scores. You would count first downs!

Enter the wonderful world of DNA research. The area with the most diversity wins… and that means that the Yucatan Peninsula was declared to be the original, prehistoric home of domesticated chili peppers. According to current thought trends, Team B got their seeds from birds and other small animals that had passed through Team A territory.

We Win!
So – there you have it. The Yucatan Peninsula wins as the original, prehistoric home of domesticated chili peppers on DNA First Downs! It was a squeaker, but an inch is as good as a mile and we are proud as punch about it! Thanks for this news goes to many dedicated researchers that include Araceli Aguilar-Meléndez, who studied all this as her dissertation project under the guidance of Drs. Kim and Mikeal Roose in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California at Riverside. The research was supported by the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS), El Coneso Nacional de Ciencia y Technología (CONACYT), and a gift from the McIlhenny Company. So says  Science Daily (June 19, 2009).

Yucatan’s Habaneros
So now you know why Yucatan has earned the prestigious label "Yucatan: Origin of the Habanero Chile".
And we’re still earning it! There are 4 hydroponic greenhouses on the road to Tixkokob. Each is approximately 5,000 sq. meters in size and they each house approximately 10,000 plants. The hydroponic technology came from Israel. Plans are in the works for 5 more huge hydroponic greenhouses in the near future, as well as a new facility for sorting and packing the chilies. (As we all know, THOSE are the people that might have to worry about gastric cancer…) Yucatan exports hundreds of tons of these little herbaceous fireballs every year (30 tons a month to one Japanese company alone!).

We understand that the greenhouses are only about 5 minutes from the Periferico on the Merida-Tixkokob highway and that they are on private property. We’ve also heard that the owners seem to like visitors and don’t mind conducting tours. But we don’t know much else… stay tuned, because as soon as we find out, we’ll put them on the Ruta Habanero!

Did we mention the 6th World Convention of Chile? From October 25th to the 27th, chili lovers from around the world will be discussing things like pest management and fertilization and looking at regression models. There will also be an art exhibit, featuring chilies, with a prize for the winner. It will be all chilies, all the time, for three days.

Are You Going to Eat That?

In a cautionary word to the wise, for those who are considering partaking of this local celebrity fruit, please note that the habanero chili is just a tad hotter than any other chili you will ever encounter. Using Scoville Heat Units, the hottest of the jalapeños tops out at between 10,000 and 15,000 units. The habanero tops the chart  at 200,000 to 300,000 units, more than 4 times as hot as a Red Amazon, its nearest competitor, and 20 to 30 times as hot as a jalapeño. Those of us who eat habaneros? We eat jalapeño-lovers for breakfast!

If you do decide to eat or cut into a habanero, you might want to take precautions not to touch them with your hands or you might want to rub your hands all over your aching knees and try out that pain-relieving theory. Even if you wash your hands well, please keep them away from your eyes for a few hours. In a pain relieving cream, that level of capsaicin may help your arthritis but, in your eyes, it’s not even fun. It just plain hurts.

With that cautionary note, we encourage you to have fun with at least one Yucateco habanero. Someone we know (we won’t name names, but his initials are W.G.) ate a whole habanero one time. Just popped it into his mouth after eating a taco while watching a parade during Carnival! That’s one taco, one parade and one habanero he will never forget!

*****

World Convention of Chile
Chilies on Epicurean.com
Is it chile? Chili? Peppers? Here’s the Wikipedia lowdown.
Scoville Heat Units
Video of a Kid Eating a Whole Habanero (silly human…)

Chile Habanero Marmalade
Some believe that marmalades are just another kind of fruit preserve and only use them on biscuits or toast. Folks from England think of marmalade as traditionally being made only from Seville oranges, and in our research we found that The European Union actually has a law that says nothing can be called a marmalade unless it is made from a citrus fruit. We guess the word about that never quite made it to the New World because nowadays people will make a marmalade out of just about anything. In fact, marmalades can be one of our most creative recipe ingredients, especially in meat dishes.

This week, we discovered that the Mayan ladies of Izamal have their own marmalade brand, Mermelada Kumán.Everything they produce is 100% natural and they have a whole host of marmalades in our retail grocery stores now, including marmalades made from papaya, mango, coconut, pitahaya and tomatoes. Mermelada de Chile Habanero Kumán is their newest creation and is creating quite a stir both in Yucatan and abroad.

Traditional Dulces

Checking with our local Yucatecan experts, we have learned that turning a fruit into a jam or marmalade is not traditional in the Yucatan. True Yucatecans know that there is always one or more delicious fruits in season, and saving one or the other for later just meant not being able to eat enough of what was in season later. The idea of marmalades and preserves came to the Yucatan with the Lebanese, who would buy a fruit when it was freshest and cheapest and preserve some of it for later when it might get more expensive. Yucatecans traditionally would add sugar to fruits like nance, ciruelas (plums), ziricotes, cocoyol and papayas, but only to eat them on the spot as a delicious dulce (sweet). Only recently have foods like that been preserved in bottles for sale.

While we don’t have the Kumán recipe, we have found an award winning Chile Habanero Marmalade recipe online for you to try. This recipe was a finalists in Sunset.com’s Centennial Cook Off and comes from finalist Ann Beck, of Tucson, AZ, who says: "It’s very versatile, and good spooned on soft lahvosh or cucumbers, brushed over meats during the last few minutes of barbecuing, even melted and poured over ice cream." Judges enjoyed the marmalade with cream cheese and crackers." (Judges can be so boring…)

Once we got started on marmalades, we didn’t want to stop. Chile Habanero marmalade isn’t the only good marmalade idea we found. We went to Home Cooking on About.com and found not only great marmalade recipes, but tips and tricks for making perfect marmalades as well.

Some of the marmalade recipes on the Home Cooking page sound a little strange, such as the one made from carrots, lemons and oranges. Some are familiar and seem like ones we would want to have available all the time, such as lemon, lime, kiwi, orange, and nectarine-orange. One of the ideas we liked was for a lazy but fabulous cake frosting, mixing marmalade and one of the Yucatan’s favorite foods, cream cheese. We especially liked the Onion Marmalade and the Red Pepper and Ginger Marmalade, both of which are made from easy-to-find ingredients here, go perfectly with almost any kind of meat and can make a plain sandwich fabulous! And if you like coconut (we do!), adding coconut to citrus marmalades makes a great condiment to go with fish. Finally, we can’t end a marmalade article, written from Yucatan, without a link to at least one Mango Marmalade recipe. So here is a link to the Mango Recipes on the Virtual Herbarium website. They’ve got everything from mango marmalade to mango pickles, salsa and chutney.

Mangoes are in season as we write this, so go down to your nearest mercado, buy a bunch of mangoes and go crazy!

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Want another way to eat a mango? Check out our mango-eating instructions.

Have we piqued your interest with that excerpt from the old Yucatan cookbook? Stay tuned for more recipes from Cocina Yucateca.

Where’s the Mexican Food?

Anyone who lives here will tell you that one of the best things about living in the Yucatan is the food. When we visited here and bought a house, we were still clueless about Yucatecan cuisine… we had no idea about the treasure trove of tastes and delights that we had stumbled into. Our idea of Mexican food was formed in California, where Taco Bell and chicken enchiladas rule the day. So imagine our surprise when we couldn’t find a quesadilla or a burrito to save our souls (or our stomachs), but instead were presented with tiny little tortillas and things like castacan and cochinita. What the hey?

As in many cultures, the food was another avenue of learning for us about the unique place that Yucatan holds in Mexico and in the world. And learn we did.

Fast forward seven years and now we’re very practiced at eating everything from that aforementioned cochinita and castacan to pavo relleno negro and papadzules. We know what a pib is and we can tell the difference between a habanero and a xcatic.

In the interest of passing on our hard-won knowledge, we plan to bring you a recipe from time-to-time. Some will be reproduceable, others might just be for show. The food here is not just full of flavor, but it is full of stories too. We are not cooks by profession, but we tend to eat rather regularly. And we love a good tale as much as a good table.

Here, then, in response to a request that was sent to Yucatan Living recently, is how we have learned that one can make authentic Yucatan panuchos and salbutes.

How To Make Panuchos

1. Sharpen your machete, stroll casually into your backyard and select a healthy pollo (chicken) or, if it’s a special occasion, a pavo (turkey). Using the machete, remove the head. Let drain. Deposit in a bucket of warm water for several minutes until the feathers can be easily removed by your eldest daughter. Remove feet and internal organs. Wash thoroughly.

2. Pick some naranjas agridulces (sour oranges) from your tree and squeeze the juice into a bowl. Add achiote (annatto paste) until thickened. Add sal (salt) to taste. Spread generously over the bird inside and out. Wrap bird in moist hojas de platano (banana leaves).

3. Remove your son’s soccer ball from your pib (the one- to two-foot-deep baking hole you’ve dug in the back yard). Start a wood fire in the pib and let burn until you have a floor of glowing red embers. Spread two to three centimeters of moist earth over the embers. Deposit the pollo in the pib and fill the hole with dirt. Let bake until done, usually 1 to 2 hours depending on the size of the bird (more time is required for a standard pavo).

4. Send your wife, suegra (mother-in-law) or the woman in your family with the smallest hands next door to the Maseca, Sumasa or Minsa tienda (store) to purchase half a kilogram (about a pound) of harina de maíz (corn flour), more commonly called masa. She will know to mix this slowly with water (roughly two cups masa with 1/4 to 1/3 cups water), while kneading the dough into a ball.

5. Cut off the bottom of a 50 gallon oil drum and prop it about a foot off the ground with large stones on two sides. Start a wood fire underneath.  Wait until any oil or other residue on the metal is burned away before using.

6. Your wife, suegra, hermana (sister) and a few other women in the family will sit around a table. Each will portion about two tablespoons of masa dough from the ball and pat into a tortilla using nothing but her tiny hands. The resulting tortilla will be about four inches in diameter, maximum.

7. She will set the raw tortillas, two at a time, on the hot metal comal (grill) constructed from the 50 gallon drum, letting them cook for about 30 to 45 seconds on each side. If she is planning to make panuchos, she will tamp them down a bit around the edges with an index finger (the tortillas tend to inflate when you do that). When each tortilla is finished cooking, she will deposit them in her lek (round, dried, hollow gourd with the top cut off), which has been lined inside with a clean, brightly-colored kitchen towel. Keep covered.

8. Remove the baked bird from the pib and let cool. Your second daughter will shred the meat from the bird by hand into short strips about two centimeters long with the circumference of a soda straw. Keep the shredded meat in a bowl and cover. Don’t forget to remind your daughter to wash her hands before and after.

9. Squeeze the juice of several limones (Yucatan lemons, which are more like limes) into a small bowl. Add finely-diced habanero chile picked from the bush growing next to the front door and, optionally, finely-diced cilantro.

10. By now, your youngest daughter (or perhaps the friendly wife of a neighbor) has diced some jitomates (tomatoes), pepinos (cucumbers),aguacates (avocados) and maybe lechuga (lettuce).  Someone has brought out a bowl of cebolla morada (purple onions), previously sliced and marinated in naranja agria.

11. Now it’s time to make a panucho. Take a warmed, cooked little tortilla balloon, and slit it open enough to deposit a spoonful or two of black bean paste inside. Drop the tortilla into a pot of hot oil and deep fry it.

12. Remove the now-crispy tortilla, place it on your plate, layer on lettuce, shredded chicken or turkey, cucumber, cebolla morada, tomato and avocado, in that order. Sprinkle habanero sauce over all, if you like to sweat and pant while you eat. That’s a panucho!

13. Eat and enjoy, probably with a side of ice-cold Mexican Coca-Cola.

Would you Rather Have a Salbute?

Then skip Step 7. Drop the fresh uncooked tortillas directly into the hot oil for deep frying. The resulting tortilla will be softer, and will not be puffed up like a balloon. Skip Step 11 and go directly to Step 12. That’s a salbute!

Repeat Step 13. Often.

Buen provecho!

The quintessential Yucatan eating experience is attained somewhere outdoors. The view isn’t great. The tablecloth (if there is one) is oilcloth atop a cheap plastic or metal table donated to the restaurant by Coca Cola. The food is dripping with sauce, hot and tasty. Your fingers and hands are covered with it and your mouth is on fire with chili de habanero. You reach for a napkin to wipe your hands and all you get is a tiny, wafer-thin servieta. But you have to do it so you can hold that cold glass of Coca Cola or agua-de-whatever long enough to quench the fire inside for just a moment. You glance up briefly from your plate and everyone is pretty much doing the same thing, concentrating on their own ecstatic experience.

We’ve just described a typical meal at Wayan’e, arguably the best taco stand in Merida (well, actually, there are two of them). When we first arrived in Merida, we were introduced by friends and now that’s what we do, too. We take our friends who are new to Merida to lunch at Wayan’e. We make sure they remember how to get there. We tell them what they need to know to get the most out of the Wayan’e experience. And then they are on their own. It’s like an initiation.

First of all, the name: Wayan’e is pronounced “why-en-AY”. When we first saw the name, we thought it was Balinese, but no… it’s Mayan and it means, “here we are”. Great name for a taco stand, don’t you think? So what *is* here, exactly? It’s a family-owned place, of course. The older couple who own it are always behind the counter. They don’t cook, they supervise, platicando (chatting) with the customers, many of whom have apparently been coming here for years. They supervise about ten workers, most of whom are chopping, cutting and squeezing. Everything is cooked fresh every morning. When the food is gone, the place closes down for the day, usually by 2:00 pm.

Most Yucatecos eat a big breakfast, which is a tradition around here. In fact, one of our friends who grew up here says her abuela (grandmother) used to say, “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper”. It’s not unusual to see locals sitting down to big breakfasts of poc-chuc or pavo en relleno negro at the local mercados. So if you go to Wayan’e at about 9:00 am or so, you’ll find a crowd. If you’re like us and used to eating heavier foods later in the day, you might think of going to Wayan’e for lunch. We used to show up about 1:00 pm until we realized that we were only seeing the xix (pronounced “sheesh”…it’s a Mayan word for the very last little bits) by that time. So we started getting there about 11:30 am at least, advice we always pass on to our friends.

Often, it’s standing room only. And then you have to lean over someone eating at the counter, order directly from the cook and get your plate handed to you over that poor someone’s head. Sometimes, there are little plastic tables with plastic chairs and someone who actually serves the food. This is a mixed blessing. It’s nice to sit down on the sidewalk next to the parked cars (such ambiance!), but when the mesera (waitress) comes and starts rattling off the different choices for that day, a normal gringo begins to wish for a printed menu. The only menu is up on the wall inside the taco stand… and it’s never comprehensive. So you have to listen carefully and catch what you can. Here are some things to listen for: poc-chuc, pollo poblano, pollo con chorizo verde, fajitas de pollo, huevos con chaya, huevos con longaniza, castacan and carne asado.

We usually order cuatro tacos (four tacos) with some assortment of those different fillings listed above. (“Cuatro tacos. Dos con pollo poblano, un huevo con chaya y un castacan, por favor, con frijoles y cebolla.”) (Translation: Four tacos. Two with chicken with poblano chiles, one with scrambled eggs with chaya, and one with grilled pork, please, with beans and onion.) You can also order these as tortas, or sandwiches served on a french roll with cheese. We keep saying we are going to try something new, but those tacos are so good, we can’t get past them.

Before the mesera leaves, we always order a drink. If we aren’t too late, there is still a selection of three or four fresh aguas de frutas (fruit juices): Agua de sandia (watermelon), agua de piña (pineapple), agua de mamey, or guayabana or guaya (they’re local tropical fruits), agua de cebada (barley with cinnamon)… they’re all delicious! If there are no more aguas left, we’ll settle for horchata, iced tea or even una coca. But we’ll be sad about it.

In less than five minutes, all the tacos arrive. They’re like little round drink coasters made of corn and filled with heaps of tasty bits. On the table are three choices of salsa: roasted chile salsa, it’s flavorful but not very hot. Avocado salsa, it’s light green and a little spicier. And lastly, the ambrosia called salsa de habanero… it’s hot. Oh, it’s hot. Wonderfully, blessedly, ecstatically hot. Our favorite strategy is to go straight to the habanero, spoon it (don’t sprinkle!) all over the tacos, and then proceed. Usually, after the first taco we don’t talk much anymore. Our mouths are burning, our noses are watering and we’re starting to see colors more brightly. The aguas come in handy to momentarily douse the flame, but the only thing that really works is to eat more tacos with more habanero.

You can find this little slice of taco heaven by going north to the Burger King circle on Paseo de Montejo, turning right and driving past the Chapur department store to the stoplight next to the big pink house. Turn right and continue todo derecho (straight) for about three blocks. This is how a Yucateco gives directions, and since you are going to eat like a Yucateco, you might as well drive like one, too.

Or however you spell it! We’ve seen it spelled about ten different ways on different hand-printed signs around town. Many of the cocina economicas, including the House of Screws around the corner, had signs advertising that they were baking them and would sell them para llevar, or for take out. So what is this mysterious thing, you ask?

Well, here’s a photo. Does that help? No? Well, let us try to explain. Around these parts, the Mayans celebrate the Day of the Dead at the end of October. This holiday is called Halloween in Gringolandia, but the Mayans call it Hanal Pixan, which means “soul food.” As the holiday approaches, the buzz increases about eating pibs during the celebrations. And when Hanel Pixan was over, Yucatecans were greeting us in person or on the phone asking, “Did you eat your pibs?”

Uhhh… no.

But then yesterday, our aforementioned Mayan housekeeper and her nubile daughter came to clean, and brought us two fresh-baked pibs. From what we understand, these are large tamales with a chicken, anchiote and chaya filling. The tamale dough is made of corn (what else?) and has black beans mixed into it. The whole thing is wrapped in banana leaves and baked underground in a pit, call a pib in Mayan, hence the nickname. I’m sure in the modern households in Merida they bake their pibs in ovens these days, but I guarantee you the ones we got were baked the old-fashioned way.

We had our pibs for lunch. Or rather, we had one. We really couldn’t even finish that one. Each one weighed about five pounds. We’re not kidding. And the crust was tough and leathery. The chicken inside was tasty and tender, but there didn’t seem to be enough of it. Another curious thing: one of our pibs was square and the other was round.

We consider ourselves very fortunate to have the opportunity to eat authentic pibs baked in the Mayan earth. But someday we’d like to try a haute cuisine version that might be a little easier to chew.