Rick Bayless is chef of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo in Chicago, creator of Frontera gourmet foods, cookbook author and host of Mexico - One Plate at a Time.
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Frontera Staff Trip: Michoacanprint-friendly versionIt had been ten years since we’d visited Mexico’s western state of Michoacan, just south of Jalisco, the land of Guadalajara and Tequila. One of Mexico’s most beautiful, well-developed states, Michoacan is famous for (at least) four things: incredible colonial architecture (Morelia, the capital, and Patzcuaro are both UNESCO World Heritage Sites), folk crafts (all the copper-work in Topolobampo comes from there), sweets (made from fruit and from caramel) and avocados. We delved into all of it, but the highlight of our trip was our visit to the Bautista’s idyllic avocado farm near Uruapan. Our vans ambled over unpaved country roads through misty, lush valleys filled with avocado and macadamia trees, past trout ponds and dairy cattle pastures until we reached a clearing with a large, open-air packing shed. As thirty-some of us piled out of the vans, a group of mariachis blared a welcome and the heavens opened. From underneath the shed’s roof, the rain-drenched swath of nature looked even more like Eden—with a slightly scratchy mariachi soundtrack.
Just when we were about to settle into our trout-in-macademia-brown-butter entrée, Alejandro Bautista barreled up in his muscley pickup. He cracked open a bottle of mezcal from San Luís Potosí (his favorite) and launched into an hour-long rhapsody for the avocado (“I love my wife, but I L-O-V-E avocados”). We were totally enraptured, as he took us from his father’s planting the first of his 200 acres of avocados back in ’65, to the virility-inducing qualities of his favorite food (whose name, by the way, means “testicle” in Aztec). We asked him about ripeness (it takes a full year for an avocado to mature on the tree, but it won’t get soft-ripe until after it’s picked), about varieties (they only grow the all-around-beloved Hass) and about the possibility of getting their meticulously raised avocados in our restaurant (hope, pray). The trout was as spectacular as the setting, just slightly less inspirational than Alejandro’s words. And the mariachis, who we suspected had had a few Coronas before we’d arrived, played for hours. It was the first time any of us had ever seen the leader of a mariachi band sit down while singing. Or smoke while singing, for that matter. Jane Alt’s exquisite photos from the trip are on display at Frontera. RB |
Clothed tables were set with smoked salmon trout from the ponds (with, of course, a somewhat combustible, mayonnaisy manzano chile salsa). We were offered guacamaya cocktails—a lime-avocado-tequila concoction that seemed better the more tequila you added. Most of us asked for Bohemias or Coronas, too.