Texas Toast

If you’re going on a trip this summer, why not make your destination one where there’s great food you can feel patriotic about? Some of the greatest chefs of the Lone Star State share a bit about our culinary history.

It all starts with the meat.

The Sutton County Steak House in Sonora, Texas. (LIVE! Photo/Joe Hyde) (click image to enlarge)   A West Texas Legend: Sutton County Steakhouse As far as Tex-Mex and other local legends go, most of them are speculative. But Linda Love of Sutton County Steakhouse in Sonora says she is the definitive author of one Texas tradition: sirloin steak bits. “Through trail and error, we’ve added things to the menu through the years,” says Love, who has been with the restaurant over 30 years. “I came up with the sirloin steak bits. Years ago, we had our own butcher shop, and we had trimmings from the steak that would usually just go into hamburgers. But I decided to start selling them as steak bits. I told Betty Zentner, and she said, ‘Oh Linda, you’ll go broke doing that’—but now she sells them too!” Love has always been a step ahead of the trends: When gas prices started going up 20 years ago, she decided the restauarnt’s off-the-beaten-path location might start to stuffer. So she decided to bring the restaurant to people. Her catering business was born. Now she caters in Del Rio, San Angelo, and other parts of West Texas, several times a week. Her latest innovation is the “Sonora 1950s room,” for which she reupholstered and covered furniture to match the era. She even solicited time-appropriate photos from her customers to make the look and feel complete. San Angelo's Silo Steak House   Liz Matthews is a chef and owner at Silo House restaurant in San Angelo, a small Texas town known for hunting and Goodfellow Air Force Base. She and husband J.R. Matthews were baptized in the Texas culinary tradition, having been born in Austin and later catering backstage for acts that came through the musically oriented city. But the two have also attended the Culinary Institute of America, giving them another perspective besides their native one. “We’re a big kind of fusion place,” says Liz Matthews. “As far as local dishes, really—we don’t do CFS, it’s more of a Latin influence than any other Texas influence. For instance, instead of doing chicken enchiladas, we’ll do chicken mole, with sauce that has 26 ingredients, from pumpkin seeds to chocolate. My husband will spend three hours perfecting a sauce.” Matthews says they change their menu every week, and only use the freshest local ingredients available whenever possible. “It’s the peppers, chilies and peppers,” she says. “The tomatoes here are fantastic; every couple weeks, there’s something different coming through. We try and grow all our herbs because in about a month our garden will be in full bloom—we have a half-acre of garden. If there is a downsize to this fresh cooking, it’s only for those who don’t like surprises. “We never put on the menu what’s the veggies gonna be,” says Matthews. Aldaco's Chili Rellenos (Contributed photo/Aldaco's Mexican Restaurant, San Antonio) (click image to enlarge)   From the Chef/owner Blanca Aldaco, Aldaco’s, 100 Hoefgen Ave, San Antonio: “Breakfast Chile Relleno” Menu price: $9.95; raw food cost percentage: about 26 percent Yield: 6 chile rellenos 6 medium to large poblano chiles, for stuffing (roast and peel a total of 8 to include chiles for sauce) CREMA POBLANO SAUCE: 2 medium poblano chiles, roasted and peeled 1⁄2 cup milk 1 teaspoon salt 1-2 tablespoons vegetable oil, for sautéing 2 large cloves garlic, minced 1⁄2 onion, very thinly sliced 1 cup heavy cream SCRAMBLED EGG FILLING: 3 tablespoons oil 10 large eggs 6 ounces thinly sliced smoked ham, chicken or beef, cut into small pieces (optional) 2 green onions, finely chopped (white and green parts) 2 serrano or jalapeno chiles, stemmed, seeded and finely chopped Salt, to taste 12 ounces shredded Monterey Jack cheese. To roast and peel poblano chile peppers, rub all 8 poblanos with olive oil. (This part can be done in advance.) Place them over hot comal (skillet), on a grill, or under broiler, turning as needed until skin is evenly charred. Place peppers on plate and top with damp towel to allow them to steam about 10 minutes. Remove charred skin. Hold a pepper from the stem and cut a 1-inch slit across and 2 inches long as in a 'T,' open gently and carefully remove seeds and veins. Repeat with 5 more of the remaining chiles. Simply remove stems, seeds and veins from the remaining 2 chiles. For Crema Poblana Sauce: Place the 2 roasted and peeled chiles in blender along with milk and salt: process until smooth; set aside. Heat oil in saucepan over medium-high heat. Add garlic and onions and cook for 5-7 minutes, or until onions are soft and translucent. Add heavy cream and poblano purée; let simmer 2-3 minutes, until flavors blend. Set aside. For Scrambled Egg Filling: Heat oil in skillet over medium heat. In bowl, add eggs, add ham, green onion, serrano chiles and salt. Cook eggs, taking care not to overcook. (It's better to undercook at this point, since they will be cooked further in the oven.) For Assembly: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place a poblano in your palm with slit facing you. Open gently, then lay a couple of tablespoons cheese along the bottom. Add some of the scrambled egg mixture, then more cheese. With both hands, firmly reshape the poblano and place on a baking dish, just large enough to hold the 6 chiles. Repeat with remaining five chiles, cheese and egg mixture. Pour Crema Poblano over top. Bake in preheated oven 13- 15 minutes, until heated through.

Meat is what unites Texas food with what’s south of the border. Both sides—Texas and Mexico—have a strong tradition of cowboys and vaqueros, herding beef for their supper. Both have used meat to make signature dishes like chili, which is rumored to have been invented in San Antonio, or Mexico’s arracheras, a close cousin of stateside fajitas.

Meat is also a great place to start because of San Antonio’s Chili Queens, some of the first Texans to dish up the meat for which they were named, and the historic South Texas district in which they, and Tex-Mex, became popular.

Market Square

Pete Cortez moved from Guadalajara, Mexico, to San Antonio, Texas, in the 1930s. Cortez met a local girl, Cruz, and with her and a “handful of family recipes,” started Mi Tierra (“my land”), an anchor in the historic Market Square area of San Antonio. The area is a shrine to San Antonio’s Hispanic heritage: Decades after Mi Tierra opened (and La Margarita and Pico de Gallo after it), the Museo Alameda became the first formal Smithsonian affiliate in 2007, dedicated to the preservation of Mexican American popular culture and entertainment. The Cortez family’s Tex-Mex food empire was successful enough, at that time, to help fund it.

But David Cortez remembers his father’s humble beginnings. Pete Cortez came to San Antonio with nothing but a glimmer of hope in recognizing a bit of his home culture.

“When my father came here in the ‘30s from Guadalajara, he hadn’t wanted to leave his homeland,” Cortez says. “But when he got here, the Hispanic downtown—present day Market Square area—was similar to his. There were also Belgian farmers, Italians, and Lebanese. But the largest group was Mexican.”

Cortez recalls an area with molinos, or taco stand street food vendors. There were also roving mariachis, who serenaded passers by for money. Pete Cortez allowed those nomadic musicians into his restaurant to serenade his clientele, whom David remembers as everyone from judges to prostitutes to cowboys—all at the same bar.

He remembers the Chili Queens, women who would cook chili amid the confetti scene. A San Antonio Light article from 1937 credits these women with being among the earliest purveyors of this Texas favorite, hawking their “spicy wares”—probably chili, and other transplanted Mexican food—as far back as 1737, right after Spanish soldiers began camping on Military Plaza. The food is now a Texas and Southern staple, as well as many a Tex-Mex dishes’ accoutrement.

But the million-dollar question is whether anything was lost in translation while transplanting that Mexican food across the border.

So What’s the Difference? Tex-Mex vs. Mexican Food

David Cortez gets that question a lot. “The people from Mexico, like my father, who came over before or during the Mexican Revolution [the early 1900s]—they all came cooking their foods of Mexico,” he says.

Tex-Mex food was born after the railroad’s post-Civil War advent brought American ingredients to South Texas/Mexican border towns. “Flour, lard, bacon and molasses became more common,” food writer Robb Walsh wrote in his “Six Part History of Tex-Mex (2000).” According to Walsh, this is around the time cooking equipment like cast-iron skillets and Dutch ovens made frying—a staple Tex-Mex technique—easier.

It’s easier to say what comprises Tex-Mex than to enumerate interior Mexican dishes that do not—for Mexico, like any other large country, has regional traditions. “The different regions—in the North, South, in Veracruz, etc.; they all have different traditions,” Cortez says. “But when those people came over here, because of different availability of ingredients, and to adjust to local tastes, that’s when those traditions became Tex-Mex.”

One thing that distinguishes Tex-Mex from Mexican national dishes is the former’s reliance on cheddar. In Mexico, they tend to use more queso fresco, a soft white cheese. There were other small changes in technique. For example, the ubiquitous Tex-Mex combination plate—one enchilada, one soft taco, one puffy, etc.—is not popular in Mexico. One would usually get a plate full of one of the above. “Also, it changed from a folded to a rolled enchilada, with chili sauce over it,” Cortez says.

Chile relleno is a popular Tex-Mex favorite, made of a giant poblano pepper that is stuffed with a protein, cheese, onions, and eggs. “We’ve always used poblano pepper instead of bell peppers,” Cortez says of the fried pepper dish, usually smothered in cheese. “It’s more traditional that way. We put it in egg batter and fry it.”

Blanca Aldaco, herself a native of Guadalajara and proprietor/chef of San Antonio’s Aldaco’s, also does a chile relleno. But hers is reinvented, grilled on a comal or hot skillet. Why? Because she sees her clientele wanting healthier options. That’s not a bad compass; it helped put fajitas on the radar in the fat-phobic ‘80s—though American consumers didn’t know it was originally the leftover, undesirable cow parts, consumed only by Mexican ranch hands. The tough strip of tendon—called ‘faja,’ because it looked like a belt—was made palatable through marinating and grilling.

It was Jorge Cortez, according to the Cortez family, who popularized it at Cortez family restaurant, La Margarita. The way Jorge tells it, his father Pete wanted him to take over the restaurant, and Jorge felt he needed to do something to impress and ingratiate himself. He recalls a trip to Monterey, Mexico, that gave him the idea how.

“They had a cast iron where they were serving steaks—arracheras, similar to fajitas,” Jorge remembers. “I decided to bring my chef so he could see. So I took him to Monterrey. I said, ‘I want to convert this—call it “sizzling fajitas.” And bring the molcajete (a Mexican mortar and pestle); I want to put the colors of the Mexican flag in this dish—avocado and pico de gallo [or “rooster’s plume,” named for the red of tomato and white of onion].’ That was the intro of fajitas to San Antonio—and I was getting calls from all over the country!”

Cowboy Food

In fact, Hispanic influences continue to shape Texas food, even when it’s not overtly Mexican. Kevin Williamson, chef/owner of Ranch 616 in Austin, Texas, is famous for his venison chili frito pie, which he always features when traveling to food fares around Texas. The chef’s main influences? Memories of his childhood, hunting wild game and talking with the Mexican ranch help who shared their food and recipes.

“The venison chili comes from just being a hunter,” says Williamson, who grew up on ranches “from El Paso to The Gulf of Mexico, all along the border.”

“We do a lot of quail, and venison, and Black Angus Texas Beef. But we pair our proteins like with our handmade tamales [corn masa wrapped around beef or chicken, usually], and we serve our ribeye on top of enchiladas—that’s the influences that I had as a child. That’s the majority of my childhood, cooking out the game that we killed during the day, and learning recipes from the Mexican ranch hands at the ranches.”

Williamson says some of the things he learned from the ranch hands included using chilies and peppers, and being able to stretch food product. “A lot of times it was just the simple knowledge and diversity of the dry chilies, and how you can flavor so many items in such cool ways,” says Williamson. “And they’re masters at adding flavor and texture to underutilized cuts of beef or chicken. Yeah, the best teachers I ever had were from Mexico.”

And Williamson needed these sort of worthy teachers to serve Texans, who “work from a base of memories” when it comes to food. “Our customers—bankers, lawyers, doctors, whatever—they have those childhood memories of that frito pie or chicken fried steak, or being able to add an egg on top of any dish on the menu—those things that are kind of Southern style,” he says.

Williamson definitely ups on the ante on these dishes. His chicken fried steak employs a 28-blend flour mixture to get the lightest batter possible. Before they’re coated, proteins are soaked in buttermilk. “I think that might be a difference that’s noticeable,” Williamson says.

When you’re doing one of the national dishes of Texas, you want to keep it traditional. But chefs also want to differentiate themselves. Williamson does it with his proprietary batter; Boomer Goodnight, original owner of Austin’s Hill’s Café, did it via his signature yellow gravy instead of the traditional white. Eliud Cardenas, kitchen manager, says the sauce, made with chicken stock, milk, pepper, and a roux, yields a richer, “country-style flavor.”

“You’ll never have it anywhere else but here,” says Cardenas, who says the hand-grilled, award-winning CFS has been made the same way since 1947. It’s grilled on a flat top, “never deep fried,” which seals in the meat’s juices.

What else is a Hills Café Texas signature? A dish that capitalizes on Texas game. But the Mexican White Wings at the Hills Café have a little secret: they’re not made of the namesake dove endemic to the South Texas valley, whose acquired taste hunters lust after. Cardenas says a bacon wrapped chicken breast with jalapeno is more palatable to more customers.

Other Traditions

Of course, Mexican isn’t the only regional influence, though it may be the greatest. Spanish, Native American and German influences also rear their heads in fusion and regional Texas cuisine.

Mark Schmidt of Marble Falls’s Café 909 in the Hill Country borrows a bit from all of these cultures while fastening his signature “rustic gourmet cuisine.”

“The Spanish were the indigenous people, from the original settlers from outside the area,” Schmidt says. “So we use more traditional Spanish ingredients, because they brought their flavors over—if you look at a lot of New Mexico cooking, it has roots more in Spain. So we got more back to the original roots.”

Schmidt takes regional cues for his cooking. Schmid uses different peppers for different dishes, as they do inside Mexico.

“You’ll use poblanos for one dish, then dry them and use them as anchos for another,” Schmidt says. His green chili sofrito, which he uses to top his 12 oz. ribeye, is also more interior Mexican than Tex-Mex.

“…Sofrito is the basis for [Spanish] rice and beans,” Schmidt says. “We start off with onions and garlic, and cook those in olive oil, then add chipotle, smoked paprika, fresh tomatoes and cilantro over the steak as a warm salsa cruda [‘raw sauce,’ like pico de gallo]. And instead of using it for the base of a rice and bean dish, we use it as a topping for our steak. And we serve it with Latin style pickled onion. Originally the onions were done in the Yucatan style, but I felt the achiote paste was a little strong.” So Schmid omitted that part, letting the balance of the meat and sofrito shine through.

“I wanted the regional influence with chilies, but also to cut through the richness of the fatty ribeye steak with the heat from the pepper and the acidity of the onion.”

The achiote shrub that Schmid mentioned is popular in Texan Latin fusion and interior Mexican cuisine. Its name derives from an Aztec language, suggesting American Indian cultivation. American and Mexican Indians have used the plant, also known as annatto seed, to tint their faces and clothing. The Spanish introduced the plant to Southeast Asia in the 17th century.

But with a name like Schmidt, Mark is almost bound to pay homage to another local culinary influence: German.

“Texas also had a large German immigration back in the 1800s, especially before the war,” Schmidt says. “Then between the two World Wars, there was a lot of German immigration, and they brought a lot of sausage making skills and charcuterie. I don’t want to do an overtly German dish; I’m not trying to do authentic German or Mexican food, I’m trying to use some of those ingredients. Because if you want authentic German food, you should go to an authentic German restaurant.”

Luckily, there are plenty in Texas. Many of them are concentrated in the areas of Fredericksburg and New Braunfels, where they settled in the mid-1800’s, according to Rudi Lechner, owner of Rudi Lechner’s Restaurant in Houston. Lechner, a native of Austria, says people drive hours to get his authentic German food.

But authentic German food can be closer to Texas staples than one may assume.

“When you trace the chicken fried steak back, it was a wiener schnitzel at one time,” Lechner says. “It was veal normally, and German-Americans found it easier to use beef. It was a little dry, so they put the gravy over it. There is a lot of crossover in these foods.”

So you see, with Texas food, it takes all kinds.