Fish tacos are just part of Mexican food tale

As well as surf, sand and sun, another thing you can count on when you spend much of winter at the southern reaches of the Baja peninsula is an endless supply of fish tacos. Casting for yellowtail, dorado, sierra and other varieties that provide the meat of a fish taco, after all, long has been the principal lure of Los Cabos, the sunny fishing settlements of San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas at the tip of Baja California Sur, where the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean mesh.

No question, fish tacos constitute a quick and convenient meal, customarily consisting of a few pieces of battered and fried fish tucked inside a corn tortilla. The dressings generally include shredded cabbage and a mayonnaise-based sauce. Assorted optional additions are wedges of lime, slices of cucumber, pico de gallo and a wide range of hot sauces. “There may be no experience on Earth that quite matches the pleasure of an afternoon spent wandering around the Ensenada fish market, sluicing fish tacos down with oceans of slush-cold Tecate beer and watching locals haggle over yellowtail tuna and horse mackerel,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold. I now suspect, however, that Gold was smitten more with the scene, the sunshine and the cerveza than the fish tacos.

By the time I got to Los Cabos, I not only had my fill of fish tacos, I was convinced they’re the most boring item of the Mexican diet. Just when, where and by whom the fish taco was hatched is a matter of debate in culinary circles, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the inventor was an enterprising street vendor responding to touring gringos who prefer their food readily identifiable, convenient, pale, bland, fried and cheap, requisites met quite neatly by the standard fish taco. Sure, over the ensuing months, we again ate fish tacos, especially at two landmark Baja taquerias celebrated for their fish, shrimp and scallop tacos: Taqueria Rossy and Cabo Mama Surf Tacos. Both were within walking distance of our casa in San Jose del Cabo.

But our diet branched out as we explored other aspects of Mexican cuisine, both ancient and modern. “Don’t eat the street food,” warned an ex-pat American schoolteacher I ran into on a morning walk soon after we arrived. It was advice not difficult to heed when it came to neon-colored clouds of cotton candy, but easy to forget when the choice was succulent and spicy tacos al pastor – slices of marinated pork stacked on a spit, fired by a gas-fueled flame and quickly cut into thin strips that fly deftly into a palmed tortilla, often topped with a chunk of pineapple flicked from atop the cone of meat.

Mexican cuisine as frequently interpreted in California is pedestrian and heavy – tacos of oily ground beef, tamales with more masa than filling, burritos big enough to double as pontoons on a fishing boat. Granted, some California chefs appreciate that cooking in Mexico is largely regional, and frequently fresher, lighter and more varied than versions we see routinely in the United States. But after three months in San Jose del Cabo, I wouldn’t try to codify a “Baja cuisine.” As Mexican regions go, Baja California Sur is too young, modern, diverse and dynamic for any one cluster of dishes to represent the state, or for even a defined style of cooking to have evolved.

Yet I sensed four currents of Mexican cooking coursing through Baja California Sur: Simply prepared seafood inspired by proximity to the Sea of Cortez, with its varied bounty of fish and its expansive white beaches, where local families have camped on weekends and holidays for generations. On the beach, the catch may be grilled quickly, then tossed onto a tortilla with a homemade salsa and a dash or two of hot sauce. In one of the region’s artfully ambitious restaurants, the seafood is apt to be prepared and presented with more precision, such as parrotfish steamed in banana leaves, topped with a pesto of cilantro and cashews, and accompanied with a ratatouille of prickly pear.

We found this all in “The Sacramento Bee” online newspaper, full credits for the content go to Mike Dunne. Continue reading the full story here…

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