Eating Like the Ancestors (Some of Them, at Least)

Christina here. When the dog and I went out for a walk on Wednesday afternoon, we paused to admire one of the many walls of corn lining the fields right now. Look closely at this photo. Just behind the dog you can spot blobs on one of the corn stalks. In fact, they're blobs growing out of one ear of corn.

Here's what they look like close up. Yuck! Disgusting. Like aliens life forms have invaded and taken over the corn kernels and blown them up to elephantine proportions.

I've been seeing this on corn cobs around here for years and scratching my head about it. Last year, I finally got around to googling. Turns out it's not aliens that have invaded the corn cobs, but a fungus that infects ears into which rain has gotten in. Science calls this fungus Ustilago maydis. In Mexico, they call the resulting galls of fungus huitlacoche and they eat them. But the galls are referred to most unpoetically as corn smut in English, which views it as little more than a crop pest/disease that needs to be eradicated.

This year, I worked up the courage to bring some of these swollen blobs home and cook them up for dinner. It's not so different than collecting wild mushrooms, after all, and I was 99.9% sure of my identification of them. Even though they're weird looking and filled with tarry, black spores, the indigenous Mexican ancestors of mine in my dad's family tree would have considered them a delicacy (although I'm assuming they lived in the part of Mexico where they grow corn). Maybe my father's mom and dad even ate huitlacoche when they were kids, before they left their small towns in the Sierra Madre in Mexico for Los Angeles. But, having never been there, I have no idea if this is the sort of place where they grow corn either.

So maybe my paternal grandparents never knew about huitlacoche themselves. I honestly have no idea. What I do know is that corn fungus galls weren't in my grandmother's repertoire of Mexican dishes by the time I came into this world, about fifty years after her family left Mexico for California. That's my defense for why I hadn't known they were a Mexican culinary delicacy, and why I jumped to the I think entirely reasonable conclusion that they were parasites from outer space. One of the downsides of integration, I guess, is losing that sort of cultural knowledge (or one of the upsides, depending upon how you feel about eating fungally infected maize flesh).

But, having summoned up the courage to eat the fungal galls, meant I first had to summon up the courage to touch them. It took courage. I expected they'd be slimy. But that was silly of me. Are mushrooms slimy? (Only when they themselves are rotting, thanks to bacteria or slime mold.) Huitlacoche aren't slimy at all. Just... spongy. I tore a few galls off the infected ear, smearing black, tarry material on my hand in the process. Which was, admittedly, kind of yuck. But I persisted, stuffing a bunch of galls in my pockets to bring home.

The galls are really cool looking when you slice them open. I hadn't expected all that internal structure at all.

But they're a little less convincing when you dice them.

I love the interwebs. What did we ever do without it (I mean, besides have to get up off our butt and go to the library). In seconds flat, I found a recipe (well, several) that suggested frying the huitlacoche up with onions, garlic, and serrano peppers. They you layer the mixture, along with shredded Oaxaca cheese, inside a corn tortilla you heat up. Then you have... a magnificent quesadilla.

I would have followed the recipe to a tee if I had lived somewhere in the world other than Germany! I had to settle for substituting the yellow bell pepper I had in my fridge and some chipotle chiles pureed with adobo sauce for the serrano chiles, low moisture mozzarella for the Oaxaca cheese, and yufka (the Turkish near equivalent of a flour tortilla) for the corn tortillas. Which also means I had to take an antihistamine because eating wheat makes me wheeze, gives me hay fever, and makes me snore.

However, I did have some fresh cilantro growing on the window sill, so that was a win! I tossed some over the top of the finished quesadilla and... after letting everyone know I was embarking on eating a foraged fungus I'd never tried before... dug in. Aaand... it was WONDERFUL. The huitlacoche tastes like a mixture of nixtamalized corn (e.g., masa) and what I imagine a truffle tastes like. Altogether it was THE BEST QUESADILLA I HAVE EVER EATEN.

And now I'm, like, d'oh! All those years I stared at the huitlacoche galls on the corn and thought EW! What an idiot I was. I could have been eating this amazingness instead. Three cheers to the person who first got hungry (or curious) enough to give the fungal galls on maize a good chew. They're totally now my hero.

The farmers here are starting to harvest the corn now. That means I have no time to waste if I want to go harvest more huitlacoche. I think I'll go out tomorrow, wandering along the outer rows of the cornfields (any deeper and the deer and the wild boars lurking within and I might end up surprising each other). The huitlacoche galls don't keep long in the fridge, but I've you can freeze them. It would definitely be great to eat it again without having to wait a whole other year.

If you're curious about giving them a go, maybe go find yourself a market that sells them either fresh or frozen.