3939A USE-ALL-PARTS STEW
Mexico’s
Party Food
Fortified with hominy, chiles, and often myriad
pig parts, pozole is a celebratory dish in Mexico
and beyond BY MAX FALKOWITZ
every time steve sando, the
founder of California-based
heirloom bean company Rancho
Gordo, heads down to Mex-
ico, he encounters a new kind of
pozole. “I remember one I tasted
in Oaxaca where the cooks used
some puréed hominy to thicken
the broth and cooked it with
goat meat,” Sando says in a rap-
turous daze. “I still think about
it to this day.”
After more than 40 trips
across the country over 35
years, the bowls have added
up: In Michoacán, a broth
was stained green with fresh
chiles, tomatillos, and ground
pumpkin seeds. In Guerrero, a
pale white variation was gar-
nished with pork cracklings.
In Acapulco, an unusual rojo
sassed with tomatoes was for-
tified with shellfish instead of
the typical pork. “Whichever
one I ate last is my favorite,” he
says with a chuckle.
An ancient stew of corn, fish
or long-simmered meat, and
a garden’s worth of vegetable
toppings, pozole is Mexican
party food. It’s the kind of
labor-intensive but universally
beloved dish to break out for
holidays and special occasions.
There is no known original
pozole or single birthplace; it
dates back to indigenous reli-
gious festivals well before the
Hispanic conquest, and early
Spanish texts shed little light
on its history. As Mayan and
other civilizations traded goods
across ancient Mexico, pozole
migrated along with them, even
up north to native tribes in the
American Southwest, where the
cooks incorporated the local
practice of roasting green chiles
and it is now spelled “posole.”
Today, Mexican pozole comes in
red, green, and white varieties,
and every region has its pre-
ferred proteins and garnishes.
But the corn is nonnegotiable.
The corn in question is
nixtamal, aka hominy, the
result of boiling dried corn
kernels with alkaline wood ash
or slaked lime (calcium hydrox-
ide, or simply “cal”) to render
the grains more nutritious and
digestible. The Nahautl peo-
ple termed it pozolli, and the
name stuck, both for the corn
and the soup made with it. Run
that hominy through a grinder
and you have masa, the doughThere’s no one kind of pozole,
and it’s never complete without
an array of toppings with various
flavors and textures.