If you wanted to sum up the cuisine of the Mexican state of Chihuahua, you could do worse than the dish I ate for lunch one day at Los Mezquites: Seared skirt steak with roasted Anaheim chiles and lots of melty cheese, served with tortillas.
These three ingredients — beef, green chiles and cheese — dominated a week-long exploration of Chihuahua’s culinary offerings. But the cuisine is much, much more diverse than that.
Let me start by saying that the city of Chihuahua, where my friend Sarah and I spent a week, felt as safe as St. Paul, or any nice, medium-sized city. We walked miles each day and never felt threatened or in danger at all. I mention this because the state of Chihuahua as a whole gets a bad rap, and while Ciudad Juarez is definitely more dangerous, this largest state in Mexico has a lot to offer, and we only scratched the surface.
Climate and culture dictate any cuisine, and that of Chihuahua is no different. It is the center of the Chihuahan Desert (duh), which is higher and starker than the neighboring Sonoran Desert, where a person could get fat if they knew what they were looking for. And where Sonora’s native influences are primarily Tohono O’Odham, Yaqui, Mayo and Seri, the Apache, Pima and Tarahumara dominate in Chihuahua.
Desert living means drying things, and no one does it better than Chihuahua. Chiles pasados, roasted, peeled, dried chiles, are everywhere. As is carne seca, and the machaca made from it; think of machaca as meat fluff, fantastic with eggs or in a burrito.
As do most places in this region, Texas included (obviously), there’s a variation on chili. In Chihuahua it’s called abigeo, and it’s beef jerky, beans, sometimes green chiles, onions, garlic and potatoes, all in a red chile sauce. It’s great, but my brain wants to add cumin.
Chacales, called chicos in New Mexico, are a cool, if unusual, corn product: Ears are roasted, then dried, then taken off the cob for eating later. They’re then stewed in things like green chile stew. You actually want them beat up and crushed a bit, so the starch gets into the broth.
Pinole is a big deal here, too. Normally it’s corn flour, but the Tarahumara made this stuff famous because they add chia to it, and their legendary running abilities eating mostly pinole have helped make chia a worldwide commodity.
Chihuahua, like Sonora, is in love with dried chiltepin chiles. The bullet-shaped chile pequins start to dominate one state to the east, in Coahuila.
Unlike my sojourns in Baja, fish and seafood play only a minor role here — although Chihuahua is the main place to find actual, real, wild trout in Mexico, and there’s a catfish stew confusingly called caldo de oso that’s big here, too. (“Oso” means bear but there’s no bear in it.) Higher-end places, like my friend Chris Duthoy’s Sulawe, fly in fish, but if you are going to a mom-and-pop place for seafood, maybe only go to the places with big lines.
Nowhere else in Mexico does cheese play a more important role. So many varieties, many named for the towns they come from, most melty and semi-soft. A big reason for this has been Mennonite immigrants, who first began coming to Chihuahua a century ago.
Queso fundido, which is to Texas queso what the sun is to a match, is everywhere, usually with roasted “chilaca” chiles in it; the quotes around chilaca are because the long, skinny, dark green chile chilaca in the rest of Mexico is not the chilaca of Chihuahua. Here, a chilaca is a synonym for a Hatch/Anaheim/chile verde chile.
The signature snack of Chihuahua, the montado, requires a healthy bit of melty cheese, too. A montado is a giant flour tortilla with cheese and beef (usually) inside, that you then open and add whatever toppings you want inside before closing and rolling like an impromptu burrito. The montado alambre, which adds grilled onions and peppers to the beef, is especially good at El Tren near city center.
Beef in general is excellent here, although I’d say Sonoran beef is a bit better. There’s more pork in Chihuahua than Sonora and Baja, but other than the ubiquitous al pastor tacos, it isn’t as prevalent as in, say, Michoacan. Chicken is non-existant other than whole roasted pollos asados or, oddly, wing restaurants. There’s even a Buffalo Wild Wings in Chihuahua; don’t go there.
Underpinning everything in the city are the Tarahumara. Women wear bright dresses visible for blocks. The city does a lot to advance their visibility, and you can easily buy crafts either directly from them on the street, or in one of several non-profits set up to aggregate artists’ works and funnel the profits back to them.
Foodwise, the most interesting ingredient the Tarahumara (also known as the Raramuri) bring to the table is arí, a resin made by ants that only live in the region. It’s crushed with citrus and salt and chiltepin chiles for a simple, umami-rich salsa. Think of arí as tangy Tarahumara MSG.
The strong influence of native groups in Chihuahua also brings corn to the fore far more than in neighboring Sonora. I’ve written before about how generally bad the corn tortillas are in Sonora and Baja. Not so in Chihuahua.
You can definitely thank the indigenous groups for that, and one of the best bites of the whole trip was a knockout quesadilla with melty cheese, fresh huitlacoche (a corn mushroom), on a green corn tortilla made right on the spot.
Where tequila is Jalisco, mezcal is Oaxaca, and bacanora is Sonora, sotol is Chihuahua. Sotol is as idiosyncratic a drink as any other Mexican spirit, and each distillers’ personality lurks within each bottle. A great place to sample a ton of sotol is El Magico, a bar near the city center. If you’re nice, they may pour you a swig of chuchupastla, an infusion of sotol with the herb Ligusticum porteri, known as oshá in the United States.
Beerwise, Chihuahua is a pivot point between Carta Blanca and Tecate. Both are good. And there are a growing number of excellent Mexican craft beers, too. I recommend a night at the brewpub El Gardenia.
When it comes to sweets, get ready for an onslaught of pecans and apples. Chihuahua is Mexico’s main producer of both.
You’ll see literally anything you can do with pecans, apples and the local pine nuts — there’s even a pink one from Pinus cembroides. Cookies, pies, cakes, candies, you name it. Apples, too. And, thanks to the Mennonites, you can literally say something’s as Chihuahuan as apple pie. Pretty cool, no?
Bottom line: If you want to experience Chihuahua, my recommendation is to spend a couple days in the city, then plan on a guided excursion to any one of the many natural wonders of the state, from Copper Canyon to the Sierra Tarahumara to the sky islands or stunning caves. You won’t be sad.
Dang. I thought you were going to eat the dog. :-(
Man, Hank
If you even need a wing-person, I'm all in (and my Spanish is pretty good too.) I would give my left arm for a food trip like that. Wish I had your job and knew what you know. My mouth is watering just looking at the pics. I tried to grow a precolonial food crop garden with my gardening students once- we ground our own corn and everything. It was pretty funny actually- but to have the opportunity to dine on indigenous cuisine that had such provenance is quite remarkable. Totally envious in CT.