-By eyesight, this is one of
the ugliest sweet things ever.
There are recipes that are part
of the cultural quilt
that make Mexico up,
and a lot of them
are pre-Hispanic
and have evolved
post-colonialization.
This is one of those that we
have to thank because of it.
These spices that weren't
native to the Americas
were brought on
through the conquest
and gave us the most
random delicious milk curd.
Claudette Zepeda here from
San Diego, California.
I fancy myself
a cultural anthropologist
of Mexican cuisine,
not by education --
strictly by nerdism,
and I am going to show you guys
how to make chongos zamoranos.
Because of the friars
and the missions
that were being set up,
sugar came to our coast.
This is one of the coolest
recipes, I think,
and it teaches you
how to make cheese,
and then you dump
a bunch of sugar and cinnamon
and make them sweet.
Since I was a little kid,
this has been one
of my favorite desserts,
and not enough people
know about it.
We just have our yolks here.
I'm just going to add
a little bit of milk.
We don't want this to boil
because you're
going to scorch it.
So because we are making a
cheese, it involves a coagulant.
This one we're using
an animal rennet.
You dilute it with water,
and this happens pretty fast.
It starts to separate.
Everyone, when you say,
"What's your favorite
dessert in Mexico?"
9 times out of 10, someone
is going to say a churro.
Churros aren't from Mexico.
They're not from France.
They're not even from Spain.
They're a byproduct
of the colonization
that happened in China.
In China,
they had a fried dough.
Spaniards took it.
It evolved, landed on our land.
It evolved.
The beauty of food, it has --
Whoever touches it
makes it evolve
and makes it grow
and makes it different,
and that's why I love
learning what I learn.
So once you have your egg yolks
in, you have your rennet in,
what you're looking for
is coagulation to start.
But you can see,
if I were to shake this,
it's almost like a buoy.
It stops being sloshy
like raw milk or,
like, just regular milk.
It almost looks like Jell-O.
It's still really cold.
And, again, you don't want
to heat too high
because then
you'll scorch the milk,
and you'll get scorched chongos.
I think Michoacán is one of
the coolest states for sweets.
For some reason, they have
a lot of the milk products,
so the milk candies, and when
you think about Mexican snacks,
the first thing
everyone thinks of is,
"Oh, I love Mexican candy."
This is that Michoacán
is kind of famous for.
It's very visually obvious
when this is kind of forming.
It's like a little island
of curd.
You want a milk
that is ideally raw
or is as least pasteurized
as possible.
That makes the curd a little bit
more structurally sound.
You just cut to make
smaller curds,
and I don't know how in history
someone decided
to take juices
that come out of an animal
and make delicious cheese,
but I thank them for it.
You can use any kind of cinnamon
that's to your preference.
Mexican cinnamon,
it's actually --
The best cinnamon
comes out of Veracruz.
It is insanely flavorful,
super spicy,
kind of like
the bubble gum cinnamon.
That's, like, the flavor
that it gives you,
and you just kind of
want to stick these
in between the curds.
We did not get sugarcane
until we started
getting the slave trades
through colonialization,
and because Mexico as a whole
has so many micro climates,
diverse terrars -- foothills,
highlands, lowlands --
we can pretty much grow anything
from the north to the south.
Sugarcane grows
beautifully in Oaxaca,
so we started seeing a lot
of refined sugar desserts.
The same time that the most
beautiful buildings
were being built
in a very European fashion,
these conquests were
hitting different towns,
and the sweets have evolved
by that process,
and it is a lot of sugar,
but, again, you're making
essentially a cajeta,
a whey caramel,
so a lot of sugar necessary.
Then we're going to crank it
about medium heat.
You don't want it to boil
because what will happen is,
as it shakes,
the curds will break up then,
so, again, nothing boils.
This is what it ends up
looking like,
and it's not
the prettiest thing.
My mouth is watering.
It's been a long time
since I made these from scratch.
You can see here
the texture on it.
It kind of looks almost woody,
but this texture,
once it's cooled,
it's incredibly satisfying.
It's a really good texture
to eat ice cream with,
to have folded
into panna cotta.
You can eat this hot,
but the perfect texture
that, like, curd chew,
that little squeakiness
that curds are known for happens
once this cools completely.
So we have some here
that are chilled,
and you can make a really
tasty ice cream sundae
by just layering ice cream
and chongos.
You've got to get a little bit
of everything in there.
That, like, squeak in your ears
that you hear
when you bite down on this is,
like, the most satisfying thing.
Though they are not appealing
to the eyesight,
they are incredibly tasty.
They also have this
deep-rooted history
in Mexico
through the colonization
and through us
becoming Catholic.
All of these sweet ideas
came from religion, go figure.
♪♪
♪♪
