How to Eat Authentic Mexican Cuisine

With Americanized variations like Cal-Mex and Tex-Mex, it's a challenge to judge how authentic a Mexican restaurant is. The cuisine began with ingredients such as maize, tomato, squash and beans but was modified by Spanish additions like rice, garlic, onions and meats. Style varies by region, with northern Mexico being strong in meat dishes and the southeast preferring heavily seasoned food.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Use tortillas as the base of your Mexican meal. Both corn and flour tortillas are an authentic part of the cuisine. Traditional corn tortillas are handmade, thicker than mass produced ones and served warm.
2. Enjoy a Mexican breakfast of eggs, refried beans and corn tortillas. Add guacamole, dating back to the Aztecs, with mashed avocado, tomato and a little salt.
3. Look for dishes with chicken, beef and pork in Mexican restaurants. Seafood can also sometimes appear on the menu but is authentic only to certain parts of Mexico, like Veracruz.
4. Eat beans with your meal. They preceded meat dishes in Mexican cuisine. The beans used in authentic dishes should be black or pinto beans. Refried beans use pinto beans cooked until they've very tender, fried in bacon fat or lard and mashed.
5. Savor the addition of tomatoes in authentic Mexican cooking. Mexican cuisine features chopped tomatoes in salsas and other dishes, but don't look for them in sauces.
6. Use only white cheeses. Cheese was a later addition to Mexican cuisine. Common varieties in authentic dishes are Panela, Queso Blanco and Queso Fresco.
7. Expect authentic Mexican cuisine to have chile peppers. Used fresh, smoked, dried and powdered, they give a special spiciness to the dish. Cumin and oregano are also common.

Tips & Warnings

• Ignore the tortilla chips served in most Mexican restaurants. These were invented in Los Angeles in the late '40s.
• Authentic Mexican cuisine includes exotic ingredients such as iguana, rattlesnake and insects cooked in traditional Aztec and Mayan styles.
• Authentic burritos only contain meat and are rolled thin.