BajaNomad

TJ: Now THIS is a burrito

Gypsy Jan - 5-1-2013 at 12:49 PM

From The San Diego Reader

http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/feast/2013/may/01/tj-n...

By Ed Bedford

"This is the true burrito,” says Yanko Quezada. “Not those big fat things you have in San Diego.”

It’s nine at night. I’ve just paid Cathy $1 for one of his desebrada burritos...here in the tight-packed little TJ street called Rampa Xicotencatl.

It's not far from the crazy traffic line at the border.

The burrito’s five inches long, and an inch round. That’s all. Has shredded beef inside, and pretty nice and juicy it is too.

I never knew there was such a thing as a “real” burrito, like one this size. This place, Burritos2Go (Rampa Xicotencatl, Leyva Aleman #229, Colonia Cuautémoc, Tijuana), is Yanko and his wife’s brand new idea: create good burritos for people waiting in the line to go north in the mornings, mainly Tijuana people working in San Diego industries like NASSCO, and coming back after work in the evening. At least 20,000 do this every work day, he reckons.

The thing is, his new store sits right on the sidewalk where people are shuffling slowly past, when the line is long enough. Which is twice a day.

“We’re lucky. We get two busy periods,” he says. “The people coming back used to enter Mexico on the other side of the inspection lanes. Now they have to come right back here on this side. It’s great for our business.”

At the moment they’re just selling four kinds of $1 burritos. Beans – the most popular – beefsteak, chicken and desebrada.

“But soon we’ll be making salads and other dishes.”

He says some guys in the morning line buy a couple of dozen to take with them to San Diego – to sell for $2 apiece where they work.

Better start eating because Yanko and Christina,Blanca and Cathy, his lady workers, are packing the place up.

t’s been a long day. “We open at five every morning,” says Yanko. “That’s when the line is longest.”

The desebrada is, well, a lot smaller than I'm used to...but nice and squelchy, and has a peppery afterkick that makes it interesting.

Then I spot a jar of cookies – galletas de canela - 25 cents each. Ooh, crumbly, cinnamon.

Then, oh man, Jesús González comes by with a bag of churros he makes at his little stand on wheels out on the sidewalk

Can’t resist. About 15 cents each. These are also encanelados - with cinnamon.

I finish up. And not bloated like after your usual big fat wrap.

“Now you can say you’ve eaten a true burrito,” says Yanko"

Mexitron - 5-1-2013 at 12:53 PM

We make "burros" up here in the US, not burritos, so my worker told me ages ago.

bajagrouper - 5-1-2013 at 12:56 PM

In the old days waiting for the Cabo to La Paz bus to depart we enjoyed real burritos at the bus station restaurant...4x$1.00

Russ - 5-1-2013 at 01:44 PM

We have vendors that drive around selling the machaca burritos. I love those things but they ask $12 for one. Today they brought taquitos 4 for $20. Of course I also bought 6 tomales, 4 chile reños, 2 pints of frejoles, 2- 1/2 pints of salsa & 2 fruit salads. Should hold me until the next vender shows up.
:bounce:

bent-rim - 5-1-2013 at 03:51 PM

When I lived in San Diego I would always get that style of burrito at Azteca on Rosecrans, across from the Body Shop. They were great. When I moved to Frisco I discovered the huge burritos at El Faro's in the Mission, they were great too. This thread made me hungry.

chuckie - 5-1-2013 at 03:56 PM

Me too, got a bag of Tamales I scored when I was at Sharis in Ascuncion...

Udo - 5-1-2013 at 06:07 PM

I have eaten at the BURRITOS 2 GO and I recall that they were a very juicy shredded beef.
Very flavorful, but kinda small, so I ordered two more...my wife wanted another one too.

Ateo - 5-2-2013 at 10:24 AM

US burritos are better than Mexican burritos. That is a fact. =)

willardguy - 5-2-2013 at 10:59 AM

did I dream it or was there a previous discussion about burritos originally being made out of burro's???:?: is there somewhere you can buy burro meat?

DaliDali - 5-2-2013 at 11:07 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Ateo
US burritos are better than Mexican burritos. That is a fact. =)


Yeah but most flour tortillas here are made with REAL PORK LARD. (Manteca)

That is why tortillas here are sooo yummie and melt in your mouth good.

Crispy fried bacon with two scrambled eggs mixed in.....salsa casera on top, wrapped in a LARD tortilla(s).....nothing finer!!

Bajahowodd - 5-2-2013 at 05:00 PM

In the cape region, thee is a small chain called Burritos Chostomo. No joke.

The varied selections of fillings are amazing.

http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g152516-d2351876-...

DENNIS - 5-2-2013 at 05:04 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Ateo
US burritos are better than Mexican burritos. That is a fact. =)



US Mexican food in general is better than Mexican Mexican food.
That's my opinion.

Mexitron - 5-2-2013 at 07:18 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by DENNIS
Quote:
Originally posted by Ateo
US burritos are better than Mexican burritos. That is a fact. =)



US Mexican food in general is better than Mexican Mexican food.
That's my opinion.


That's a pretty broad brush of a statement...obviously you've never had Tex-Mex:lol:

xolotl_tj - 8-25-2013 at 11:45 AM

The state of Sonora is generally regarded as the birthplace of the burrito or burro -- Sonorans use the two terms interchangeably -- and Mr Bedford is describing the sort of burrito you're likely to find there even today.

In fact, it's unlikely you'll find big, heavy burritos in Sonora because their tortillas aren't designed for that much stress. Their ordinary flour tortillas are too small, usually only twenty-five centimeters in diameter, and their tortillas sobaqueras are much too thin and fragile. The burrito-as-lunchpail, I suspect, was something developed north of the border and close to Hollywood.

Sometime in the early 1990s, National Public Radio commissioned one of their chicano reporters out to find the origin of the burrito. He set out bravely from El Tepeyac in East L.A. and fought his way down the uncharted wilds of Carretera 15 until he discovered Hermosillo. There he came upon a place called Xochimilco, where the manager told him he had arrived at the source of all burritos. His discovery was duly reported on NPR.

Truth to tell, Xochimilco was The Place to eat in Hermosillo back when there were no other places for the local politicians and ranch owners to meet; even today it is still one of The Places. It is also true that they offer burritos as an appetizer. But I think the manager of Xochimilco was having a bit of fun at the expense of that chicano, rather as if Canter's Deli were to tell an out-of-towner that they invented the hot dog. "Yes, the burro is from Sonora," another restaurateur in Hermosillo once told me, "but I don't think it could be from here. It would have to be from the northern part of the state."

The traditional burrito is really just the northern version of the taco, so it's a good way to serve left-over guisados. Reheat the guisado so that its liquid cooks down and thickens. Use freshly made tortillas, which are sold half-cooked, so finish cooking both sides of the tortilla on a dry griddle or comal, then fill it, fold it up, and return it to the griddle to seal its layers closed. You should then have something every bit as good as Burritos2Go.

[Edited on 2013-8-25 by xolotl_tj]

Bob H - 8-25-2013 at 11:57 AM

I have a passion for carnitas burritos here in San Diego. There are a couple of places here, I have found, that make fantastic carnitas burritos and I try to avoid them, but sometimes, I can't. I love a great carnitas burrito with home made hot sauce poured over every bite, sometimes combining the hot sauce with guacasalsa!!

durrelllrobert - 8-25-2013 at 11:58 AM

The precise origin of the modern burrito is not known. It may have originated with vaqueros in northern Mexico in the nineteenth century; farmworkers in the fields of California's Central Valley, in Fresno and Stockton; or with northern Sonoran miners of the 19th century.

In the 1895 Diccionario de Mexicanismos, the burrito was identified as a regional item from Guanajuato and defined as "Tortilla arrollada, con carne u otra cosa dentro, que en Yucatán llaman coçito, y en Cuernavaca y en Mexico, taco"
(A rolled tortilla with meat or other ingredients inside, called 'coçito' in Yucatán and 'taco' in the city of Cuernavaca and in Mexico City).

An often-repeated folk history is that of a man named Juan Méndez who sold tacos in a street stand in the Bella Vista neighborhood of Ciudad Juárez, using a donkey as a transport for himself and the food, during the Mexican Revolution period (1910–1921). To keep the food warm, Méndez wrapped it in large homemade flour tortillas underneath a small tablecloth. As the "food of the burrito" (i.e., "food of the little donkey") grew in popularity, "burrito" was eventually adopted as the name for these large tacos.

Bubba - 8-25-2013 at 12:36 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bob H
I have a passion for carnitas burritos here in San Diego. There are a couple of places here, I have found, that make fantastic carnitas burritos and I try to avoid them, but sometimes, I can't. I love a great carnitas burrito with home made hot sauce poured over every bite, sometimes combining the hot sauce with guacasalsa!!


I agree!

xolotl_tj - 8-25-2013 at 05:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by durrelllrobert
The precise origin of the modern burrito is not known. It may have originated with vaqueros in northern Mexico in the nineteenth century; farmworkers in the fields of California's Central Valley, in Fresno and Stockton; or with northern Sonoran miners of the 19th century.

Yes, I agree that to look for the "precise origin" of the burrito would be a snipe-hunt. But I cannot credit vaqueros, farmworkers, miners, or even Juan Méndez with its invention for the simple reason that it is not an invention -- it is just the northern version of the taco -- while the Guanajuato burrito that Ramos y Duarte mentioned in his dictionary used a tortilla made of corn, not wheat.

Here's what Horacio Sobarzo said about the burro in his Vocabulario Sonorense:
Envoltorio de tortilla con carne o algún otro alimento, taco. Alude el vocablo a la carne de burro que ha sido apetecida por nuestros indígenas. La carne seca del vacuno es muy gustado en Sonora, y se ha observado en algunas ocasiones que, aprovechándose esta circunstancia, se trafique fraudulentamente con carne oreada de burro. Es de presumirse que en lugares donde se servían fritangas se diera gato por liebre, y aludiéndose a ello maliciosamente se denominara burro al taco.

"Burro: beef or other food wrapped up in a tortilla, a taco. The term refers to donkey meat, which our Indians enjoy eating. Dried beef is so popular in Sonora that, on several occasions, air-dried donkey meat has been served instead. The riffraff believe that greasy-spoons make use of this scam regularly, so they call tacos from those places 'burros'."

Sobarzo was not only a literary writer, he was also Sonora's governor -- not what you call a disinterested authority. But no one is when they're talking about the food of their own region.

The ethnologist María Cristina Suárez y Farías, writing in the Atlas Cultural de México, said that "the burritas" of Chihuahua (note they're feminine in Chihuahua) "made with flour tortillas and various fillings such as machaca, ham, and cheese, make up one of the norteño dishes most well-known in the rest of the country." Oddly enough, the authors of the section on Sonora don't mention the burrito in either gender, although they mention the chivichanga (fried burrito) four times.

There is a north-south split in Mexico much like the one in China: in the arid north of both places, wheat takes the place of the more culturally appropriate grain. It is to be expected that, everywhere in Mexico that wheat predominates, the tortillas would be made from its flour. That we find burritos (and not burritas) in California and New Mexico can be explained by the migratory patterns of the last two and a half centuries: "recruited from among the riffraff of Sonora and Sinaloa," wrote Carey McWilliams about the early settlers in North from Mexico, "they were certainly a nondescript lot."

J.P. - 8-25-2013 at 06:31 PM

I grew up eating TEX. MEX. food the first time I ate MEX. food in Mexico I thought it was Diet Mex. No flavor. :lol::lol: