For a long time my favorite cuisine was Lebanese but there is a new player in town now that I have been living in Mexico, this food is amazing. My experience of Mexican food prior to arriving here was pretty much Tex-Mex cuisine like burritos and hard shell tacos, chili con carne and nachos. This is actually kind of what I was anticipating before I got here and boy could I not have been more wrong, the food here is epic, and nothing at all like the Tex-Mex stuff, which by the way I still rather enjoy.
There are many reasons why so many fall in love with Mexican cuisine and here is why I think that you will too.
Weird and Wonderful
I always love it when nations are proud of their food and the fact that they use ingredients grown on their own soil, and that is very much the case here. Mexicans use just about everything that they can get their hands on when they cook, and that creates a diverse variety of dishes. For example you could indulge in an insect pizza, eat flowers with your salad or dive in with what is known as Mexican caviar, ant eggs. As my buddy Javier Burillo has always told me, there is little that goes to waste in this country and the cuisine is a representation of taking something and making it beautiful.
Range
There are some cuisines around the world which rely heavily on a similar collection of spices and ingredients for its dishes. Whilst this doesn’t take anything away from the flavor of those meals, it can be somewhat restricting. When it comes to Mexican cuisine there is just such a diverse range of flavors which you can enjoy. There are light and fruity flavors like chile ennogada which features a chili pepper packed with cooked mince and covered in thick cream and pomegranate seeds, and at the other end of the spectrum there are deep flavored dishes like mole. In fact even within the likes of mole there are hundreds of varieties of flavors to choose from. There is really something for everyone within the Mexican kitchen.
States
In the US there are meals and cooking styles which vary by state but in general they do not drastically vary. In Mexico however each state has its own marked style and special dish, that you almost have 31 countries here providing food. This is much of the reason why Indonesian cooking is so popular, because of the huge population and the division between them, which has caused each individual sector to provide its own style of cuisine, all under the banner of one nation. This is again why Mexican food delights so many people and why there is such an enormous range of dishes which you can get here.
And so it looks like I have a new favorite food and if you are yet to try authentic Mexican food then you too may be on the cusp of finding a new favorite.