Tlacoyos in Mexico City: what to order and what to avoid

Overview

A tlacoyo is an oval cake of corn masa, thicker than a tortilla and pinched to a point at each end, stuffed before it is cooked and then toasted on a flat griddle, the comal. The filling is sealed inside the dough, not spooned on top: that is the whole idea of the thing, and it is what separates it from almost every other street antojito it sits beside. Once it comes off the comal it is split along the top and dressed — nopales (griddled cactus paddle), raw onion, coriander, a crumble of dry white cheese, and a spoon of salsa. The masa is frequently blue-grey rather than yellow, because the central highlands grow and nixtamalise blue corn, and a blue tlacoyo is the everyday one here, not a novelty.

It is honest to say plainly that the tlacoyo is not this city’s own invention. It belongs to the wider central-Mexican highlands — the Estado de México, Puebla, Tlaxcala and Hidalgo as much as the capital — and you will eat a very good one in any of them. What the city gives it is ubiquity and a captive morning crowd: it is one of the fixtures of the street griddle here, sold from before dawn by women who press each one by hand.

The name is Nahuatl, from a root meaning roughly “stuffed”, and the form is genuinely pre-Hispanic — a Nahua food of ground corn and beans that needed no wheat, no lard and no Spanish kitchen to exist. There is no colourful royal anecdote to debunk here, which is itself worth saying: the tlacoyo’s pedigree is the plain linguistic and Mesoamerican kind, not the disputed-document kind. It was being eaten in this valley long before the city had its current name.

What to order

The choice that matters is the filling, and you name it when you order. The four you will meet most often:

• de frijol — refried beans, the default and the one most stalls lead with. Earthy, cheap, reliable.
• de requesón — a soft, fresh, ricotta-like curd. Milder, a little richer, and the one to ask for if beans every morning wears thin.
• de haba — a paste of dried fava beans, faintly bitter and very old- fashioned; a good stall’s habas are a small revelation.
• de chicharrón — pressed pork, the heaviest of the set.

So the sentence is simply “un tlacoyo de frijol”, or de requesón, and so on. After that you choose the dressing: con nopales adds the cactus, and verde o roja picks the salsa — green (tomatillo, sharp) or red (dried chilli, deeper and often hotter). Con todo gets you everything the comal has out. Two or three, mixed across fillings, is a proper breakfast rather than a snack.

The one thing worth getting right is what a tlacoyo is not, because the street griddle sells its cousins side by side and they are easy to confuse. A huarache is much bigger and shaped like the sandal it is named after, with the toppings piled on a flat oval base. A sope is a small round with a pinched rim, topped rather than stuffed. A gordita is round and split open after cooking to be filled. Only the tlacoyo is oval, pointed and stuffed-then- griddled — ask for one by name and you will not be handed a huarache by accident.

What to avoid

Almost everything that goes wrong with a tlacoyo is a freshness problem, and it is visible before you order. The genuine article is pressed and griddled to order: you should see a woman patting a ball of masa flat, tucking the filling in, closing and shaping it, and laying it on the comal in front of you. A stall that keeps a tray of finished tlacoyos under a cloth and reheats one to hand over is selling you something gummy and steamed-soft; the toasted, faintly blistered skin only survives a few minutes off the heat.

Be wary of the plate-sized tlacoyo buried under toppings that turns up in sit-down “antojitos” restaurants in the tourist-facing centre. A real one is a modest hand’s length and the dressing is a garnish, not a load; a giant version drowned in cream, three cheeses and shredded meat is a restaurant’s idea of the dish scaled up for a photograph, and the masa underneath is usually the least of it. So is the suspiciously uniform, machine-perfect oval — hand-pressed masa is slightly irregular, and a row of identical stamped ovals points to a frozen pre-form heated up rather than made.

Finally, do not let a good tlacoyo be judged by its salsa alone. The point of the thing is the corn and the filling sealed inside it; a stall whose masa is thin, pale and flavourless is not rescued by dressing it heavily, and heavy dressing is sometimes exactly how a thin one is disguised.

Practicalities

A tlacoyo runs roughly 15 to 30 pesos apiece — snack money — so a filling breakfast of two or three is still small change, and a price much above that range usually means you have wandered into a restaurant version rather than a street one. At the comal it is cash only: the woman working the griddle takes coins, not cards, which is the general rule for the street-food stalls the city guide already tells you to carry cash for.

The tlacoyo is morning food. It is at its best from the first griddles before dawn through to the early afternoon, sold at fixed corners, near Metro entrances, and above all at the tianguis — the street markets that set up on a different day in each neighbourhood, so the good comal you find on a Tuesday may be three streets away and gone by Wednesday. The comaleras tend to pack up by mid-afternoon; a tlacoyo is not a dinner, and a stall still frying at night is usually doing something else with the leftovers.

The single most useful habit is to buy where you can watch it cooked. A tlacoyo you see pressed, filled and toasted in front of you is the whole dish delivering on its one promise; one lifted from under a cloth is the same shape with the best part gone.