Mexican Smut
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When I first came up with my stone-ground grits, I wanted it to be an ode to corn. I was determined to get as many different versions of corn as possible into the dish, so there are stone-ground grits, corn cream (simply corn blended with water, the starch in the kernels thickens it), fresh corn kernels in the grits, and finally there’s huitlacoche. This is what freaks everyone out. Huitlacoche (hoot-la-ho-chey) is Mexican corn smut, or corn fungus, or Devil’s corn, or (in a literal translation) “raven poop.” It’s a fungus that attacks about 5% of corn crops grown in Mexico and it actually fetches a higher price than the corn.
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Huitlacoche in the wild.
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The fungus gloms onto the corn kernels and causes them to get so big and mutated that some farmers like to slice them off and fry them in butter. In the US, they’re mostly available canned or jarred since they’re highly perishable and they don’t grow in fields that have been treated with pesticides, meaning they don’t grow in too many American corn fields. They have a dark, rich, earthy taste, almost like Latin American truffles, and I blend them into a cream that I dot around the plate.
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“You say cuitlacoche/I say huitlacoche…”
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They add a deep, inky, almost smoky flavor to the dish. When people ask what they are, I tell them that they’re Mexican truffles, which is a term supposedly invented for them at a dinner in 1989 at the James Beard House when Josefina Howard, the founder of Rosa Mexicana, gave an all-huitlacoche dinner there which included huilachoche ice cream, tortillas, and soup.
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That black dot is the huitlacoche cream on my grits.
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(Learn more about huitlacoche)
