Well, What's Next?

Mexico is next!

So to summarize the er, situation, when we were last checking in in May: Kalani had closed and Puna had been altered dramatically.

I was wandering and pondering around the Big Island, living in my camper van Razorback One in various parks and driveway surfing in the entrances and yards of various friends. Sounds kinda grim for most folks, but I was loving living the anonymous life of a spy in the South Seas (spying on exactly what the reader may reasonably inquire).

This reality had set in for me and I assume for most Kalani people: we were not on vacation waiting to return to Kalani. Kalani is dead. People wondered in their various ways " well, what's next?"

Gradually, as the ohana realized that Kalani was closed permanently or at least  for the foreseeable future and the Puna as they/we had lived it, was, ahem, "modified" for decades to come, they/we drifted off.

Maybe back to the mainland to some kind of vague and ambiguous "home", maybe off to other islands/lands in search of new adventures or work.

It was Mexico for me and Lilly. The price was right and you don't need a visa for six months.

After an extensive tour of the US northeast coastal beaches and the mountains of New York's Catskills visiting family and friends, Lilly and I landed at this apartment in a quiet (quiet that is for Mexico City) suburb called El Parque.

Although in three weeks I have never felt threatened, security is very tight in Mexico. In our apartment, you had to use a lock-box to open this cage encircling the apartments, then using a second lock box to open the steel door to the unit; there were bars on the windows as well. I guess it would be the same for a walk in street level apartment in New York City.

Very cool and relaxing once you locked your bad selves in for the evening.

Maguey, agave as we know it, is basically as revered as maize in pre-Hispanic lore. Sort of like the coconut or buffalo in other indigenous cultures, it was used for many things. Its use in making tequila and mezcal however is what is most important to us post-Hispanic folk. Some varieties are mass cultivated, it grows wild and is planted ceremoniously in many places.

One night, as we were headed out for an early by Mexico City standards 9:00 PM dinner, I left the keys in the key bowl on a dresser inside the apartment and cringed when I pulled the steel door shut and it echo-slammed me with prison cell door finality...

and signified that we were seriously locked out of Fort Knox.

A week ago or so ago, the father of the owner and maybe his seven year old grandson checked us in to this airbnb. Not a word of English between them.

Although multitudes have obliviously figured it out with no Spanish, to live like this full time it really helps to speak some Spanish.

Case in point:

during mandatory siesta time, through our curtained and barred window, I had noticed the grandfather and grandson, our only connection to our apartment, walking by from time to time. But I had no idea where they lived.

Locked out at 9:00 PM, I now had to walk down the darkened Mexico City Calle 1914 street knocking on the steel gate if I saw a light on, then having to ask these people in heavily accented Gringo Spanish if they knew where a grandpa lived with a grandson. The first house didn't respond to my inquiry, but the second one knew exactly who I was talking about and helpfully pointed out their apartment.

I explained the situation to grandpa and he grabbed a 10 foot PVC pipe and coated the end with masking tape. He then stuck the pipe through the bars on the window and deftly stuck the keys in the ceramic bowl on the dresser with the ball of masking tape and pulled the pipe back through the bars.

Whew! But I had to think it would be easier for them to have a couple of spare keys.

Ok Lilly, ready for some tacos al pastor?

It has been years since I took a Metro.

After living in jungle A-frames, isolated Hawaiian parks, evacuated sub-divisions and such for years, riding the metro in DF (slang for Distrito Federal, the official name of Mexico City) especially near the Zocolo, was quite the wake up experience.

I came to Mexico City in 2005 with my children, ages at the time 18, 16 and 14. The original plan had been to go from DF to Oaxaca then on to the Pacific coastal beach town of Puerto Escondido. Upon further research, Oaxaca was ~7 hours by bus, and Puerto was another ~11. Round trip as well. No way that was going to fit into a high school spring break. So we stayed the week at Mundo Joven Zocalo a cool multi-story Mexico City hostel, overlooking the Zocolo and had many cool adventures.

Multi year Kalani Alumnus Gerard and his friend Joe lead the way touristing

I had done the research on Oaxaca and Puerto Escondido 13 years ago, so when Mexico came up, why not start in Oaxaca?

Eventually we were joined by Kalani alum and exotic locale expat Gerard and his friend Joe. One day in particular we went touristing and finished the day off with a few drinks at that hostel's roof bar. At dusk and as the Zocolo flooded with paper mache caricatures, marching high school bands, a million other religious, tribal, indigenous and zealous patriotic parades, Lilly and I thought we would escape the chaos and catch a quiet little subway back to suburbia.

There is the great bar on the rooftop of the Mundo Joven Hostel that over looks the Cathedral and Zocolo. Price is right as well.

NOT THAT EASY!

13 years ago it was the death of Pope John Paul ll that flooded the Metro lines leading to the Zocolo.

This time it was September 15, Mexico's Independence Day, celebrating the start of its revolt against the Spaniards in 1810.

I had forgotten the harrowing rides with the kids 13 years ago. It was our first time in the chaotic subway world of downtown Mexico City at festival hour. The cars were so jammed with people that the doors were shutting on the latecomers and we couldn't breathe.

Vendors were indifferently hawking chewing gum and spicy grasshoppers, blind and disfigured beggars stoically pleading for a few pesos and I was panicking about leaving 14 year old Caroline on the platform as she watched with horror as me and her brothers pulled away forever from the station (obviously didn't happen but at the time it sure seemed possible).

Not much had changed.

Except this time I was worried about losing Lilly. We stopped two times in the tunnels between stations. Long excruciating waits, pressed against the chests and backs of strangers, vendors and beggars. Interminable minutes of long yoga breaths (coupled with the fact that the six shots of mezcal were kicking in that I had had back at hostel bar) wondering if the crowd was going to have to force open the emergency widows and make a long dark walk through an electrified metro tube....now where is that third rail again?

Mexico's City Zocolo. Did the half mast Mexican flag have something to do with the holiday?

Chicken Breast with Red Mole I had for lunch one day.

After a couple of weeks in DF, we caught the bus 7 hours southwest to Oaxaca City, Oaxaca. Mexico has bus travel down. The buses are state of the art: brand new luxury rigs, nice wide seats, multiple bathrooms, movies, heavy curtains on the windows and refreshments. Wish air travel could be as nice. The ~300 mile trip was like US $25. The bus station for points west is above.

Pics at our patio at Casa Paloma where we stayed in Oaxaca

When Gerard and Joe were staying with us, Casa Palomita was $13.50 per person a night. Loving the prices in Mexico!

Most, if not all all private homes and businesses in Mexico are walled compounds. They have seriously locked nondescript entrances that open into cool, discrete and hidden garden flats. I recognize many of the same plants wandering around Oaxaca that were in Hawaii, as the two are on roughly the same latitude. Here is one of the little alcoves scattered around our casa. Notice that on top of the 12 foot wall there is an electrified cyclone fence. Again, very cool and relaxing when you get home from touristing and lock the baddies out for evening activity.

 Most days we would just wander and ponder about:

Cool little apartment under the old aqueduct.

Waiting for the taxi with a handful of Mexican culinary herbs.

Chilies of every description

giant cabbages

Many more indigenous tribes are in Oaxaca: Zapotec, Miztec, Ixcatec and dozens more

I could talk about corn but I would rather talk about Mezcal. 

To oversimplify, tequila is mezcal but mezcal is not tequila. 

Both tequila and mezcal are maguey (agave) based distilled spirits. Tequila can only made from blue agave (agave tequilana), the majority in the state of Jalisco, where the town of Tequila is located.

Mezcal can be made from over thirty varieties of agave, some of them wild. Espadin is the most common/cultivated one. The majority of Mezcal is made in Oaxaca.

Both tequila and mezcal are made from the harvested core of their respected agave plants shown in the picture above. This processed core, called a piña, is carbohydrate loaded. Now days tequila is typically produced by steaming the agave piñas inside industrial ovens to convert the carbs to sugar. It is then distilled two or three times in cooper stills.

To make mezcal, the piñas of the various wild and cultivated agaves are roasted in these earthen pits, lined with lava rocks, woods and charcoal and then covered with processed agave mulch (bagaso) and earth, for several days. Hence the smokey flavor.

The smoky, cooked maguey piñas are then mashed on this tahona stone; in this case, pulled by a tired looking horse that was somewhere over in that structure drooling in the shade. Some old timers in the interior still use bats to break apart the cooked agave. 

This is how tequila was originally made but only a hand full of distillers still use this method. Many distillers of mezcal swear by this ancient style. Crushed agave is in that pile in the background.

The crushed smoked agave is put in these fermentation tinas and fermented for about a month. Only water is added. The whole mess is inoculated by air borne yeasts that miraculously and inexplicably float in from somewhere, right on time. 

These old mezcaleros have their secret recipes. Some of these artisan country folks (same types of folks that used to make moonshine in Appalachia) might still use hides or stone pots for the fermentation and wood fired clay pots with bamboo tubing for the distilling. Whatever worked.

Mezcal's recent popularity coincides with the farm to table movement. Perversely it may be its downfall. 

Celebrities like Bing Crosby helped make tequila famous in mid century America. As Mexico industrialized and the massive worldwide demand for tequila began, the old ways were abandoned.

Tequileros rapidly developed technology to extract the maximum amount of liquor from each agave in the shortest amount of time. It became so successful that it created a new group of the nouveau riche, the hacienda heritage class.

Originally, “mezcal” was a generic term, like “wine,” for a spirit produced all over Mexico. Tequila, now a two-billion-dollar global business, is just a style of mezcal; developed in the state of Jalisco; it is made from a single variety, the blue agave, using a largely industrialized process, and consumed on spring break in the form of slammers. 


Often mixed with other alcohols and enhanced with caramel coloring, tequila can also pick up flavors from the wood in which it is aged—sometimes spent whiskey barrels bought from the United States.

Column stills were used instead of pots, and masonry ovens replaced the pits: no more smoke. Then masonry ovens gave way to autoclaves, speeding up production, and most companies invested in shredders, to break up the agave mechanically. In some tequila distilleries, the agaves are no longer cooked at all; the sugars are extracted by washing the raw plants in a chemical bath.

Tequila (read Cuervo) has gotten to the point where it’s like Tyson chicken. 

Fortuitously, the new generation wants to know the chicken’s name, place of origin and upbringing history before they eat it.

Meanwhile, as tequila boomed, regular mezcal, the equivalent of hillbilly moonshine, at heart a home made hooch, largely remained bumpkinly humble and unromantic but with its own mythology.

 Its makers hid out in the mountain towns and formed a loose resistance. Many of today's mezcaleros who make "today's" artisan mezcal are illiterate, economically marginal and live in communities where there is no Internet. Recipes and techniques are passed down for generations... man do they know their stuff.

Mezcal’s ascent is both a victory for those who love it and a cause for concern. The grains for whiskey are planted and harvested each year. Grapes are perennials. But most agaves, succulents, kin to asparagus, resist domestication. 

Espadín, one of the easiest agaves to grow, takes up to a decade to mature, and each piña yields only about ten bottles of mezcal. Prized wild varieties can take longer and yield less. Tobalá, a tiny, feisty plant that grows under oaks on high-altitude slopes and secretes an enzyme that breaks down granite, needs as many as fifteen years and gives up about two bottles of mezcal per piña. Tepeztate ripens over a quarter century. 

The desire to consume a botanical time capsule is fraught.
Every precious sip both supports a traditional craft and hastens its extinction. 

A handful of the old timers still use clay jugs for the still. As the demand for mezcal grows in the United States, more large scale mezcaleros are adopting the efficient modern money making techniques

At of this writing, hundreds, maybe thousands of artisan farm operations are still toiling away using the traditional methods.

Drink up sweet reader, before it's gone.

Ah you may wonder, what does Chef Ted look for in a mezcal?

The earliest evidence of chocolate use is traced to the Olmecs in South Central Mexico as early as 1900 BC. The truncated history is that the Conquistadors took chocolate back to the Spanish Court, where they added sugar and honey and thus began the world craze for all things chocolate.

Chilis of course originated in Mexico some 6000 years ago. The abridged version is our boy Columbus gave them the name "peppers" as they were hot and spicy like the familiar black pepper (genus piper). After introduction by the indigenous peoples of south central Mexico (Oaxaca) to the seafaring traders of the world, chilis then spread everywhere and thus began the world craze for all things chili.

Oh I guess I could write about maize or the chocolate based culinary sauce Mole the way I wrote about mezcal, but maybe another time.

 Moles, as are chocolate drinks, are available everywhere in Oaxaca. Red, yellow, pink, green, but we prefer the black moles. Every woman selling them has her own secret recipe (like mezcal), sometimes involving up to forty ingredients.

Above is a shot of an Oaxacan care package that I sent my brother: chocolate powder for a malteado,  a chocolate milkshake that is quite common in market stalls, black mole, a bottle of chipolte sauce (made from smoked jalapenos, which are available in all the markets, so one could presumably make one's own, but why bother?).

The saddest part of this story (for my brother that is) is that bottle of mezcal pictured above, made from Tobalá maguey and distilled in an earthen pelanque, was not allowed through by the DHL shipping company (not sad for me and Lilly, as we returned that mother muy pronto to Casa Palomita).

Hadn't had had a coconut in several months. The watermelons are awesome here as well. 

View from a restaurant window where I had a mole one day.

Two kinds of Copal and a copalera

I forgot one more Oaxacan product.

One day I decided to piss away the afternoon at Mexico City's Museo Anthropologia  At one particularly gruesome display of discovered human sacrifice remains and paraphernalia, I noticed that the Aztecs burned Copal when psyching themselves up to murder war captives, criminals, undesirables, geezers, women and children. 

 It reminded me that when Cortez arrived in Mexico City, Montezuma and company weren't exactly sitting around eating nuts and berries. After all, these people perfected the art of surgically removing the still beating hearts from the victims with a few svelte and well placed slashes using a specially designed for the purpose flint knife.

But I digress. I asked the guard to translate copal for me. She said it was a pre-Columbian tree resin, not unlike frankincense and myrrh, that was and still is burned as incense at religious ceremonies. Furthermore, it was still available at any market stall that specialized in magical potions. Gotta get me some of dat!

After some searching, I became the proud owner of a bag of white and black copal and the copalera to burn it in. Following some experimentation, we luckily were able to clear some space.

One day we took a road trip 70 km west of Oaxaca to see Heivre de Agua a pertified waterfall.

A taxi takes you from Oaxaca to a very isolated region and then there is an hour ride over rough terrain, hanging on the back of one of these collectivos. (cost US $2)

The falls are created by relatively small amounts of water, super saturated with limestone, that spills out of cracks and fissures in the mountains.

Over thousands of years, the calcium carbonate water creates stalactites like those found in caves, but here they look like a waterfall.

The Zapotecs of yesteryear said the water had magical and healing properties. (Now where have I heard that before?)

So what does Chef Ted want in a mezcal?

Dear reader,

the mezcalero must be an anti-authoritative illiterate philosopher that offers the wisdom of the ages to gringos in his original Nahuatl language. He must be able to switch roles easily between human, animal and spiritual form.

He must live in the most inaccessible parts of central Oaxaca. I want this mezcalero to use the wildest, hardest to get, longest to mature maguey he can find out there while prospecting on his burro. The piñas must be smoked in an earthen horno lined with coals and rocks and then beaten apart with a bat by his nephew. The mash will be fermented in animal skin lined stone pits.

The still must be made of earthen jugs and the piping made of bamboo. After he adds the fermentation to the still, his yield must be only two liters per 100 piñas.

Then I want to drink the final magic potion with the mezcalero under a cactus, where he will impart the wisdom of his ancestors to me.

This whole experience must be free of charge.

Am I asking too much?



Thanks for stopping by