🇲🇽 Mexico · Family: El Taco Callejero · Region: Central Mexico
Huitlacoche is corn that has gone interestingly wrong. A fungus swells the kernels of the cob into soft, dark, bluish-grey galls, and what most agriculture treats as a disease, Mexican kitchens treat as a delicacy with few equals. The taco de huitlacoche is the cleanest way to taste it: the galls sautéed with onion, garlic, chile, and epazote, then folded warm into a tortilla. The flavor is hard to place and easy to remember, earthy and mushroomy with a smoky, almost truffle-like depth and a faint sweetness left over from the corn it grew on. It eats inky, soft, and savory, a taco built around a single strange and excellent ingredient.
The craft is in not ruining something that is already good. Fresh huitlacoche is cut from the cob and cooked fast in a little fat with chopped onion and garlic, often a serrano, and almost always a few leaves of epazote, whose sharp, resinous, faintly petrol-like herbiness is the classic partner and cuts the fungus's earthy weight. The galls release a dark liquid and collapse into a soft, juicy, near-black mass; the cook holds them just long enough to soften and concentrate without drying them to a paste or, at the other extreme, leaving them watery and raw-tasting. A good huitlacoche taco is tender, glossy, deeply savory, the epazote present but not loud; a poor one is bland because the huitlacoche was old or stretched with too much onion, watery because it was rushed, or muddy because the epazote was dumped in by the fistful. The tortilla is corn, warm and soft, a fitting frame since the fungus is corn's own; a stale or cold one only gets in the way of a delicate filling.
The same sauté is a workhorse beyond the taco: it fills quesadillas, where melted quesillo softens its edge, folds into crepas in restaurant kitchens, enriches soups, and stuffs tamales. It usually wants only a green salsa and maybe a little cheese, since the huitlacoche is the whole reason the taco exists. The melted-cheese quesadilla de huitlacoche, where the dairy changes the fungus into something rounder and milder, is a different and very popular thing, and it deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.
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