86 MARCH 2020
A COOL EVENING LAST SPRING, I pulled my rental car to the
side of the road and got out in front of a small white build-
ing in La Madera, New Mexico. I had come to the tiny rural
town—45 minutes beyond my last bar of cell reception—with
a ticket to Shed, a dinner project by chef Johnny Ortiz. Ortiz,
who trained at Alinea in Chicago; The Willows Inn in Lummi
Island, Washington; and Saison in San Francisco, had come
back to his home state to cook off the land and showcase the
flavors of New Mexico.
I cracked open the wooden door and stepped into a room that
was warm and flickering with candlelight. On a far wall, shelves
were stacked with clay plates and bowls. An in-progress clay pot
sat drying on a table; a similar vessel, filled with dry-farmed
Anasazi beans, bubbled on a wood-burning stove. Ortiz and his
dogs greeted me, and his Shed partner, Afton Love, handed me
a mezcal cocktail on the literal rocks–rose quartz to be exact,
sifted from the hand-dug clay Ortiz collects from a valley nearby.
The stones infused the smoky drink with a textured, wine-like
minerality and immediately set the tone for Ortiz’s exploration
of locally foraged and historically cultivated ingredients.
Ortiz balanced the rustic with the refined throughout his
tasting menu of dried, spiced bison; elk tartare; and foraged
pine nuts, mushrooms, cactus, and asparagus, but it was the
clay I kept noticing most of all. Ortiz served everything in his
handmade, unglazed pottery, which lent a mineral essence to
every bite of the perfectly seasoned food. And then the beans
arrived. Toward the end of their cooking, Ortiz had stirred in
a remarkable amount of hand-ground red chile paste. “But
really, the main star is the clay cooking pot,” he said. The pot,
he explained, was made of a mica-rich clay that was alkaline,
which softened and sweetened the piquant, acidic paste.
Ortiz ended the meal with a wild-herb tisane served in an
unglazed clay cup, an infusion that mingled with the raw-
mineral flavor of the clay for a parting sip that has stuck with
me, reaffirming the taste of place, as powerfully as the first fine
N
O
Burgundy I was ever poured. I’d cooked
from Paula Wolfert’s seminal Mediterra-
nean Clay Pot Cooking, and I’d dabbled
with cooking rice in a Chinese clay pot
and beef stew in a ceramic braising pan.
But the flavors and textures I had just
tasted engaged clay in a way I’d never
experienced before.
I left New Mexico with an urgency
to know more about clay-pot cooking.
After eating those mica-cooked beans, I
wanted a pot to cook with at home, so I
contacted chef Katharine Kagel, of Santa
Fe’s classic restaurant Cafe Pasqual’s,
who is an expert in micaceous clay
pots. She extolled the versatility of clay
for cooking. “There are so many shapes!”
she said. “And since they don’t have metal content, you can use
them in the oven, on the stove, or in the microwave.”
Like Ortiz, Kagel favors micaceous clay pots that use
clay from local volcanic beds. The distinctive pregnant-
bellied pots, whose mica content gives the surface a glit-
tery appearance, are the legacy of the late Apache potter
Felipe Ortega, who died in 2018. Ortega learned the process
from a blind, 90-year-old Apache woman named Jesusita
Martinez—one of the last people who knew how to make the
pots—shortly before she passed away. For over 40 years, he made
pots and taught a new generation of potters the craft. It’s a
laborious process. First, wet clay is coiled and roughly shaped
into a vessel, left to dry until leathery, and then scraped until
smooth. After drying again, the pots are sanded and then bur-
nished with river stones, creating a perfectly smooth surface.
The dried pots are pit-fired using wood like red cedar; the level
of oxygen present during firing predicts the final color, from a
yellowish copper to a glittering pitch black.
At the root of Ortega’s dedication to making those pots was
an obsession with perfectly cooked beans. “When I first met
him, he handed me a pot and some beans and said, ‘Don’t add
any seasonings at all and call me in the morning,’ like a doctor,”
Kagel remembered. “My God, I had no idea beans could get so
much flavor from the cooking pot.”
Of course, I had to order one.
FOR THE PAST 20,000 YEARS, people have depended on clay as
a fundamental building material for shelter, storage, and tools.
Religious and cultural origin stories illustrate the importance
of clay to early civilizations, with gods shaping terrestrial mat-
ter into human form. (Fun fact: In her origin story, Wonder
Woman was also sculpted from clay.) Modern scientific theory
(ever heard of primordial soup?) actually points to the minerals
and moisture found in clay as having the perfect conditions for
life to spark. But perhaps most crucially for humankind, clay
BEAN POT
Micaceous clay from
New Mexico trans-
fers heat gently to
beans, cooking them
evenly in an alkaline
environment, which
neutralizes any bean-
toughening acids. The
natural sweetness of
the legumes is aug-
mented by the slow
cooking for an unpar-
alleled result.
BRING IT HOME: Orion
Langdon Bean Pot
(From $125, pasquals
.co m)
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