Daily Dose of English 69
(American) Mexican Food
Daily Dose of English 69
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about American Mexican food. And this is a bit of a special episode, I might say, because I'm going to start a small, I guess, sub-series, a series within another series, talking about the American versions of food. because the United States is, it's often known as a country of immigrants because most of the people that live there nowadays are not originally from the country and the continent. That is a whole problem in and of itself. However, I can't change that. I'm from Oregon. That's where I was born and grew up. And so I'm from there and that's not really my choice. but that means that the United States has a food from all over the world. There is food that is very popular in the US that is not from there, right? It's from a distinctly different country and often it becomes a different version of that food. And so we're gonna start today by talking about American Mexican food. So the food that is heavily influenced or is from Mexico or Mexican immigrants and is a big part of American culture. I'm going to be talking about all sorts of different kinds of foods over, um, every so often. And so if you have more suggestions about them, please let me know. But I know that I'll cover all of the big popular ones. However, we're starting today with Mexican food. Um, I do live in Mexico and I've spent a lot of my time learning about Mexico and I love Mexico. And so I do know about like real Mexican food in quotes, but I'm not necessarily going to be talking about that. So for example, you don't really find esquites anywhere in the United States. Um, that's a very delicious street corn. So I'm not really going to be talking about it today. I'm not going to go into more depth. Today I want to focus on the things that you do find in the U.S. and give that different spin on it so that maybe if you're from Mexico and you're listening to this podcast, you can hear those the interesting differences between what you know as Mexican food and what we think of as Mexican food. And so the first thing to know about American Mexican food is that it's heavily influenced by the north of Mexico because of geography. It's closer to the U.S. in northern Mexico, and so a lot of the northern Mexican foods are more popular and well-known in the U.S. Things that are from further south aren't nearly as common. And so a really good example are tamales. Tamales are really, really common foods, are very common in the US. I said that weird. They're a very common food in the US, but they're almost always the version with corn husks. So the outside of corn, which is then used to fill with a sort of dough, it's a dough essentially, but it's very, very thin. And so it's very wet and kind of watery almost. and you fill the corn husks with dough and then you have some stuff inside, some filling, maybe some cheese or some chicken or something like that. And then they're steamed, so they're put into a large pot with a little bit of water at the bottom, which then starts to create steam and cook the tamales that way. There's other kinds of tamales that are popular in Mexico, but those aren't as common in the US. You can still find them, but they're not as common as the default corn husk tamale. And so tamales are a fairly common thing that you can find, and they're usually very delicious, but they can go wrong if you have too much dough and not enough filling. They get really dry and they're not as good. The most common ones are like a typical chicken or pork with green or red salsa. And those you can find in lots of markets and Mexican restaurants in the US. The next thing that this brings my mind to is chips and salsa. Chips and salsa is what we would call a staple, especially in parts of the country with more, I guess, Mexican influence because it becomes a really popular thing that people latch onto because it's really delicious. and it's exactly what it sounds like. It's chips and then salsa. So tortilla chips, not like potato chips, tortilla chips with some kind of salsa. There are hundreds of thousands of varieties of salsa, so it's impossible to say exactly what salsa it is, but it's typically a red, fresh salsa, meaning that it hasn't been cooked very much and it's mostly fresh ingredients with a base of tomato. and this salsa becomes something that you dip your chip into when you eat it directly. This is another thing that's not as popular in Mexico. You can still find it, but it's not as big of a thing. In the US, it's really common. If you ever go to a party, you're gonna find chips and salsa. If you ever go to a Mexican restaurant, they will bring you chips and salsa to start. It's a very, very common thing and it's a great like quick snack as well. There's a sort of a local brand from where I'm from of chips and salsa that are really, really good and so you can eat a fair amount of them because they're so delicious in just a couple of minutes and it kind of fills you up a little bit and you can wait to eat later or something like that. And so if you're not a person that eats chips and salsa and you go to the U.S., I definitely recommend you try it. It's better than it sounds. It sounds a little bit boring, but it's really good. What else? Oh, probably the biggest, most known thing are burritos. American-style burritos were called that mostly because they were invented in the U.S. because they weren't invented by Americans. They were invented by people that usually came from northern Mexico. But they were really popularized in the U.S. You can find them in Mexico now, and probably before as well, but the main difference between Mexican burritos and American burritos are the number of ingredients. In North Mexico, burritos are super popular, they're delicious, but they typically have one thing inside of them, one filling or one, I guess you'd call it a, the Spanish word is guisado, which translates to stew. So it's like something that you make to put inside of a tortilla. and that would make a burrito. However, in the US, it's more common to find a burrito with everything inside of it. Beans, rice, some sort of meat, lettuce, tomato, sour cream, cheese, you put everything in a burrito and it becomes this, I've actually heard them described like the size of a small baby because they could become beefy, like they're thick burritos. and they are undeniably delicious when done correctly. One of my favorite restaurants back where I'm from is, well, it's a whole Mexican restaurant, but I would only get a burrito, because their burritos are really, really good, they're not too expensive, and they are just full of just delicious food. And the thing that they do a really good job of is distributing the ingredients well. Distributing is when you make sure that something is in all different areas or parts or something like that. So for example, a company might distribute its product all over the world. So Apple distributes iPhones all over the world. But in a burrito, more specifically, it means that there is not a pocket of one ingredient. Because you don't want to bite into a burrito and have a pocket of just cheese, or just sour cream, or just rice. You want it to be spread out in the entire burrito. And that's what they do a really good job of. And they also have a wide range of different things to put inside your burrito and whatever. It's very good. And burritos are probably one of my favorite American Mexican food things. The last thing I'll mention is tortillas, which I've said a couple of times before, but a tortilla is a flattened corn-based, not really a bread, because it's really just corn and often some kind of fat, so it can be either oil or animal fat, and then water. You can also just do it with water. There's different styles, though. They can be done with corn, like I just said, which is more common in Mexico and in parts of the US. But you can also do it with flour, which is very common in the north of Mexico and also became the default, so the normal thing for the US. And so that's why burritos also got so popular is because flour tortillas are bigger and they're more malleable. That's a fantastic word that I love. Not only is it fun to say, malleable, but it means something that you can easily shape and change the form of. A smaller corn tortilla, if you fold it too much, it'll break. It'll just tear apart and you can't do anything with it. But a flour tortilla is almost impossible to tear unless you're trying to. And you see, you can roll a burrito entirely in this tortilla, a flour tortilla, and it won't break. And that's why they're possible, because you can have these nice thick flour tortillas. Um, but nowadays corn tortillas, flour tortillas are very common all over the country for tons of different things because of the massive influence on Mexican food to United States cuisine. So that's enough for this episode. Um, I love Mexican food. I'm actually going to leave a spreadsheet that I made in the description of this video. It is a Mexican food bingo chart. If you ever have the opportunity to go to Mexico, you can download this and you can try to check off all of the actual Mexican delicacies or Mexican foods that I think are the most important and usually very, very delicious. But that is everything for this episode. I hope that you enjoyed it and I hope that you enjoy this series going forward. Let me know what you think in the description and I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye!
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