Tequesquite, key element in tamales
Wayne Lundberg
through yeast. But it is not that visible. Tequesquite is the rock-salt
remnants from the Texcoco lake as it has been evaporating for thousands of
years. It looks like sugar candy, semi transparent, crumbly chunks. Contains
tons of minerals among them salt and soda which is the key element to making
any decent tamale or cornmeal delight like the Michoacan Corundae (sp?).
Something to be considered as we Mexican food enthusiasts pursue great
tastes, textures and the like in ourquest to food paradise.
Wayne.
Albrecht
wrote:
> Tequesquite is the rock-salt
> remnants from the Texcoco lake as it has been evaporating for thousands of
> years. It looks like sugar candy, semi transparent, crumbly chunks. Contains
> tons of minerals among them salt and soda which is the key element to making
> any decent tamale or cornmeal delight like the Michoacan Corundae (sp?).
Hmmm. Didn't somebody mention "tequesquite" in here just last week? It
would be easier to just use table salt and baking powder.
Another chemical that is frequently mentioned is the
slaked lime that is used to nixtamalize corn in order to make masa.
Slaked lime was also known in the Mediterranean world. In Djudeo-
Espanyol (Ladino), slaked lime is called "kal" and it was used to
white wash houses.
Wayne Lundberg
"Albrecht" <von.r...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1175570057.4...@e65g2000hsc.googlegroups.com...
anthropologists that Tehotihuacan (The sun and moon pyramid complex north of
Mexico City) culture came to a sudden demise because of over use of the
trees to cook the caliche used to make plaster to smooth over the pyramids
so they could be painted. Diego de Rivera preferred plaster to paint on and
got Frida to do the same using small plaster boards. Gives the paintings
depth, so they say.
Albrecht
wrote:
> It's been said by some
> anthropologists that Tehotihuacan (The sun and moon pyramid complex north of
> Mexico City) culture came to a sudden demise because of over use of the
> trees to cook the caliche used to make plaster to smooth over the pyramids
> so they could be painted.
Hmmm. That's a different use of the term "caliche" from what I
understood, but I learn new and interesting facts every day. And I can
use those facts to astonish other people with the breadth of my
knowledge. ;-)
As you drive south from Phoenix towards Tucson, you'll encounter the
ruins of Casa Grande, a Native America structure which the National
Park Service sign says is made of "caliche", not adobe as most would
assume.There's a roof over the ruins, to keep them from melting in the
rainy seasons.
"Caliche", in my former understanding, was a coarse dried mud,
composed of sand and tiny pebbles and some soil. There was no straw
used in caliche, unlike adobe. Caliche is tan colored, and adobe is
dark brown, at least when it's made of river bottom mud.
Perhaps the NPS' mistaken definition of "caliche" came from a
misunderstanding of what Spaniards meant, when they talked to
Americans entering the Southwest?
Webster's says that "caliche" comes from the Spanish "cal", which in
turn comes from the Latin "calx".
"Caliche" is impure sodium nitrate, NaNO3, found in Chile and Peru.
It is also a crusted calcium carbonate formed on certain soils in dry
regions by evaporation of rising solutions.
Wayne Lundberg
On Apr 3, 8:50?am, "Wayne Lundberg" <Waynel...@worldnet.att.net>
wrote:
Interesting. I thought caliche is plaster, made from superheated calcium or
gypsum. Now you've motivated me to get into Google for som serious research!
Bottom line is the pyramids were wildly decordated by painting over
plastered walls and fronts. Some can still be seen and enjoyed.
And surely the lime (lye?) used to make nixtamal is made from wood ash left
from the cooking sites, potash (potassium carbonate) and lime (calcium
oxide)?
Wayne
Albrecht
wrote:
> Interesting. I thought caliche is plaster, made from superheated calcium or
> gypsum. Now you've motivated me to get into Google for som serious research!
> Bottom line is the pyramids were wildly decordated by painting over
> plastered walls and fronts. Some can still be seen and enjoyed.
Perhaps a thousand years ago, both Spain and England were covered with
forests. Perhaps you've heard of the Great Caledonian Wood that
extended from Scotland to Wales. It's 95% gone now, and England's
heavy industrial centers are there.
Spain wasn't that wooded, except near the Pyrenees, because of the
dryer climate due to the fact that the Iberian peninsula is
essentially part of Africa.
The builders of both countries needed lime for their cement, and they
cut down the forests to heat limestone so it could be pulverized into
lime. Later, the British continued to cut down their forests for wood
to make charcoal to fire their furnaces as they manufactured steel and
iron products.
Spain didn't become industrialized. The wealth of the New World was
squandered fighting the Protestant Reformation. Millions of people
expelled from Iberia and France went to England, Holland and Germany
to work in the factories there.
> And surely the lime (lye?) used to make nixtamal is made from wood ash left
> from the cooking sites, potash (potassium carbonate) and lime (calcium
> oxide)?
Lime and lye are two different things. The flat Yucatan peninsula and
south Florida are made of limestone formed from the skeletons of
an incredible number of ancient animals that extracted calcium from
sea water to form their skeletons.
Later on, flat plains made of limestone get lifted up and great blocks
of limestone are found in the mountains, far from the sea where they
formed a billion years ago.
I recently viewed a video that showed Mexican laborers prying
limestone out of a mountain in Mexico so they could burn it to extract
the lime.
Nixtamalization seems to be a multiple step operation. The lye is used
to soften the husks from the dried white corn by its caustic action. I
suppose a mild acid would do the same thing, but we wouldn't care to
take either an acid or a caustic into our systems.
If I go to Food4Less and look in the Mexican products section, I can
buy a little bag of slaked lime for about $0.69. The slaked lime is
not going to turn into lye with the addition of water. It is to be
added to the ground white corn.
It's just so much easier to buy masa seca or masa in a bag.
Wayne Lundberg
Mexican theme grocery store on Broadway and Main.
But you bring up an interesting scenario of disappearning forests and the
like. And this brings to mind today's debate on global warming.
The Wisconsin Ice Age has not stopped because Al Gore or anybody else in a
science classroom has decreed a change. It has been going on now for over
50,000 years, trapping some Mongol explorers here in Central America, and
only some 15,000 years ago letting them out and others in as the lush
forests of northern Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona and even California were
brought to their knees to become wastelands and deserts. Again, humans had
nothing to do with this.
Nor did humans have anything to do with the evolution of the Sahara
wasteland. But that's another story.
Interesting thread, even though mildly related to Mexican cooking.
Wayne
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Albrecht
wrote:
> Nor did humans have anything to do with the evolution of the Sahara
> wasteland. But that's another story.
I flew up the Nile from Aswan on my way to see the temple at
Abu Simbel and the lady next to me remarked how it was a shame that
there never was any water down there.
I told her that I could see dozens of dry watercourses (wadis) below.
Wadi is Arabic for water. Spanish words like "agua" and "guado" come
from wadi, as does the name of the Guadalquivir river in Spain.
If you saw "The English Patient", you may recall that the
archaeologist left the blonde-haired lady in the cave of the swimmers
where there were pictographs on the walls of people swimming
perhaps 10,000 years ago.
That cave really exists. There was a video about the reason for the
climatic changes in North Africa. As I recall, the desert was formed
because there was *less* heat in the summer, but I don't recall the
details.