We Gon' Cook Up Tonight

Today our Language and Culture group had the chance to take a cooking lesson at Mérida's Culinary Institute (Instituto Gastronómico de Mérida), founded by internationally reknowned Chef David Luna Maldonado.  We learned to make a traditional Yucatecan dish - Brazo de reina, a tamal filled with powdered pumpkin seeds and hard boiled egg.  Part of what makes this dish quintessentially Yucatecan is the incorporation of blanched chaya leaves - an herb endemic to Yucatan - into the maiz dough used for the outside of the tamal.

Once we blanched and chopped the chaya leaves and incorporated them into the dough with a little bit of fat, it was time to knead knead knead.  While some members of our team worked on the dough, others chopped up tomatoes to make the sauce, or cleaned the banana leaves which would be used to encase and cook our tamals.  Then it was time to put them together.  As you can see in some of the photos, we laid the dough out in little in little circles, put in the ground up pumpkin seeds and chopped up egg, and painstakingly folded the banana leaf into a small rectangle (well, we tried to). 

For dessert, we prepared a traditional Latin American dessert with a Yucatecan twist: arroz con leche.  Dairy abounds, so those with lactose intolerance beware! Our arroz con leche recipe called for 3 types of milk: whole milk, evaporated milk, and rice milk.  These had to simmer in a pot with cinnamon sticks before we added the rice, and then it was a matter of a few brave souls standing over the pots, stirring until the rice reached a nice al dente texture.  Luckily, they weathered this daunting task.

Then, well, it was time to eat! Buen provecho!