PicoBlog

When I’m camping in the US, my go-to staple food is rolled oats, because they’re available in most stores, and I can cook them if I have a stove or just re-hydrate them overnight in kefir, buttermilk, or water. But here in Mexico, I wanted to try something more local. I learned about pinole back when I read Born to Run; it’s the preferred trail ration of the Rarámuri (aka Tarahumara), probably the world’s best long-distance runners. I already wear huarache-style sandals based on their designs, which are incredibly light and tough yet comfortable, so I figured their food might have that same kind of efficiency that takes generations to refine. In its most basic form, pinole is a mixture of toasted maize flour, cinnamon, and sugar, but it can also have cocoa, agave, chia seeds, chile, vanilla, and so on. The Tarahumara runners are said to mix it with water as a drink or form it into a paste in the palm of their hand, but at home it can also be baked into cakes or tortillas. Now, Born to Run made pinole sound like some rare and mystical food of a secretive tribe, but it’s actually pretty common here, especially if you include the very similar beverages atole, which has the taste and consistency of a sweet cinnamon chowder, and champurrado, which is the same but with chocolate. As far as I can tell, the major difference between these and pinole is that the maize in pinole is toasted more, and I imagine the pre-cooking might make it more suitable for mixing into a cold drink on the trail. In any case the number of variations on a theme suggest that these drinks have been around for a long time, and it’s said that pinole goes back at least to Aztec times and maybe further.

Pinole itself is still widely consumed in rural Mexico and Central America, and on one of my first days in Guadalajara I spotted some small bags of it for sale outside the Mercado Corona for 10 pesos (about 50 cents) and bought one. When I mixed it into a drink back at my hostel and tasted it, I was somewhat disappointed. It seemed to have just the maize, cinnamon, and sugar, so the flavor was somewhat simple, the texture was gritty, and it was far too sweet for my taste. I decided to make my own. I searched online for recipes in both English and Spanish, and was again disappointed. They all seemed to be for the same three-ingredient, over-sweetened product. But hey, I’ve always used recipes as more of a jumping-off point than a strict method, so I took this as a chance to play around and create something to my taste. I found a really good dry-goods store and made the poor shopkeeper fill countless bags of ingredients. Back at the hostel, I spooned them into a bowl of water, tasting and adjusting as I went. Here’s what I came up with (measured by volume since I didn’t have a scale):

12 parts purple maize flour (harina de maíz morado) 4 parts powdered whole milk (leche seca entera) 3 parts cocoa powder (cacao en polvo) 3 parts cinnamon powder (canela molida) 3 parts white chia seeds (chia blanca) 1 part ancho chile powder (chile ancho en polvo) 1 part unrefined sugar (azúcar mascabado) about 1/4 part salt (sal)

The recipes I found started with whole maize and said to cook it over medium heat until it started to pop. Mine was already ground, so instead I cooked it until it started to steam and then a few minutes longer, about 15-20 minutes, stirring constantly. The aroma was nice and toasty and people walking by the kitchen said it made them crave popcorn. I found the result to be very satisfying either hot or cold, with a complex flavor profile. The dregs can still be a little gritty, but I’m hoping that gets better with long soaking, and if not, it’s something I can get used to. I’m planning to use it as my main ration while camping, supplemented by refried beans (which they sell here packaged in sealed bags). Inspired by what else was for sale at the dry goods store, I came up with another experimental food that’s a variation of pemmican but with Mexican ingredients:

150g cocoa butter (manteca de cacao) 100g dry shredded beef (machaca) 100g chile-flavored dried pineapple (piñas enchiladas)

I simply melted the cocoa butter, mixed in the other ingredients, spread it in a pan, cooled it in the freezer until it was solid again, and cut it into convenient pieces. For a first try it’s not bad. A travelling beekeeper from near Bordeaux tasted it and gave me some notes: “It’s… tasty, but the flavors are confused. There is no… union.” He was right, although I pointed out that the original pemmican was valued more for never going bad than for being especially delicious. Anyway I think the combo of fat, protein, acid, and spice is a nice complement to the pinole, which has a very earthy flavor and not much fat. As a bonus, I discovered that piñas enchiladas are a really addictive snack.

As I was fooling around in the kitchen, it got me thinking about how recipes and even ingredients have evolved over the ages to work well without anyone needing to know why (this is a common trait of antifragile systems). For example, some people believe that cinnamon helps regulate blood sugar, so maybe part of its function in the pinole is to help stretch out and regulate the release of energy. Whether this particular theory turns out to be true or not, my guess is that it’s more than just a flavoring. And I believe this goes deeper, into the very genetics of the grain at the heart of the recipe. Why did the ancients refer to grain as the “staff of life” and yet now a lot of popular diets recommend limiting or eliminating it? While we tend to think of commodity products like grain as roughly uniform, they can have highly variable nutritional properties. For example, quite a few people have told me independently that they have digestive trouble after eating wheat flour in the US but not in France (where I’m told GMO crops are banned). The difference could certainly be something like glyphosate residue, but it also might have something to do with the wheat itself. Whenever we breed a crop for one trait, we have to allow other traits to become less optimized, especially ones that aren’t being tested as part of the breeding program. Even before Monsanto brought us Roundup-Ready crops, the Green Revolution was breeding grains to have larger heads (to increase yield), shorter stems (to reduce the risk of wind blowing over the large heads), and less energy put into self-defense and stress-adaptation (because we have pesticides, fertilizers, and irrigation).

What might have gotten lost in that process? It’s hard to say, and in my opinion our current nutritional science is far too primitive to form a reliable theory. What we can do though is look at the situation from an evolutionary perspective and imagine the pressures on the grain and how that might affect its development. Ancient grain-based civilizations saved their seeds and planted them locally, causing them to evolve into landraces that were uniquely suited to particular soils, weather patterns, farming techniques, and so on. When one group of people competed with a neighboring group, part of what decided who won had to be health, and the group with better nutrition would be able to field larger and stronger farmers and soldiers. So is it possible that group selection has acted not just on people and culture, but on our crops? It’s very speculative of course, but to me it seems like all parts of such a living and interconnected system would evolve to be more mutually supportive. Whatever help the grain needed to be productive through droughts and pest infestations, the farmers were learning how to provide it. Whatever it is that our digestive systems need to make us healthy and strong, the grain was learning how to produce it, without anyone needing to understand the how or why.

In recent times, that system has been decoupled somewhat. The less physical our work, the less our society’s success depends on nutrition at all. The same high-production grain varieties are now used worldwide, and the pressure on them is to have maximum bushel-per-acre yields, minimum fiber (we’re mostly just milling that off), total reliance on irrigation and chemical inputs, and improved processing and baking properties. Nutrition doesn’t really come into it, so to me it seems to follow that our grains could be getting worse in some dimensions that we don’t understand and maybe won’t ever understand. The only way I can think of to reverse this trend is to buy heirloom varieties, minimally processed, organic, and locally grown if possible. It’s unfortunate that crops like this have gone from the staple food of the common people to a luxury product, but with enough demand we could recover some of the old ways at least a little. I was excited to find the purple maize and white chia in the dry-goods store, since these are both heirloom varieties. Is there a real difference? I don’t know, but my taste buds, themselves evolved over millions of years to detect nutritive value, seem to say there is. A friend of mine bakes delicious sourdough bread from kamut and I swear I can taste something ineffable and nourishing in it. But anything we do can’t help but be a combination of old and new, like my pinole: made from heirloom seeds but packed in a gallon ziploc bag, inspired by an ancient tradition but adapted to my up-to-the-minute tastes. As I finish writing this, camped out by the ruins of an old hacienda, my muscles aching from yesterday’s hike, I take a sip of this strange brew and I taste the force of life flowing through the centuries.

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