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Taste your way through Mexico City
Corn fans also should check out pozole, a stew teeming with corn kernels, pork, onion, diced lettuce, radishes, red sauce and lime.
If you want to return home claiming to have eaten one of Mexico's most traditional dishes, then you have to try mole, a rich, creamy, complex sauce made from a variety of spices and ground nuts, several types of chilies and in some cases cinnamon-laced Mexican chocolate. Depending on its origin and additional ingredients, mole can be black, red, yellow or green, and usually is served over pork, chicken or turkey. Both the central state of Puebla and the southern state of Oaxaca are famous for their moles, which can be found in any number of traditional Mexican restaurants scattered throughout the city.
Two other classics are mixiote, a Central-Mexican dish of chicken or pork steamed in cactus or banana leaves and topped with chili-infused sauce; and pibil, an entree from the southern state of Yucatan comprising pit-roasted pork or chicken that often has been flavored with achiote before it is roasted in banana leaves.
Since before the Spanish conquest, Mexican housewives and chefs alike have cooked with squash blossoms (flor de calabaza in Spanish), the flat-leafed nopal cactus and cuitlacoche, or corn fungus, all of which appear frequently in soups, tacos, crepes and as side dishes. Those who prefer something more edible-sounding may call cuitlacoche corn "truffle" instead of "fungus." Whatever you call it, the fungus is a delicacy in Mexico, and has an earthy, mushroom-like taste.
If you've always wanted to appear on "Fear Factor" or simply are a history buff, you may want to sample Mexican prehispanic specialties including ant eggs, known in Spanish as escamoles, maguey worms, or fried grasshoppers, known as "chapulines".
Escamoles have their own unique taste, and vary according to how they are prepared, but some have likened their flavor to corn, barley and even shrimp. They look much like white corn kernels when served. Chapulines are crunchy, with a consistency similar to fried onions, though the taste is mostly of the chili in which they usually are soaked. Though these foods are hundreds of years old, they remain delicacies for the modern Mexican palate.
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At Izote, a restaurant owned by famed Mexican chef Patricia Quintana in the swanky central Mexico City neighborhood of Polanco, diners can feast on large chilies stuffed not with the traditional beef and rice, but with salmon ceviche; enchiladas filled with French Brie, not Mexican Oaxacan cheese; mole made of jamaica, the hibiscus plant whose flower is most commonly used to make flavored water or tea; and a red snapper fillet with cuitlacoche and saffron cream sauce instead of the traditional chilies, garlic and butter.
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A safer tactic is to look, listen and smell — but don't eat — as you wander through the markets filled with their bright colors, intense aromas and crowing vendors. Then head to one of the thousands of restaurants where hygiene is a bigger priority. Staying healthy will allow that many more days of pure binging pleasure.
Buen Provecho!
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