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Food

Reclaiming My Mexican Roots in a Pile of Buttery Biscuits

When I moved to Atlanta last year, I wondered if I would have to swap out California’s incredible Mexican food for good Southern food. In the end, I just synthesized the two.

When I moved to Atlanta last year, I wondered if I would have to swap out California's incredible Mexican food for good Southern food, the way that I once had to exchange it for pizza and deli sandwiches when I lived in New York. Although Atlanta's Mexican food game was better than I had expected, I am forever the homebody and am constantly cooking. Thus, the majority of the meals I ate the first summer that I called Atlanta home was the Mexican food I prepared myself.

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The first time I tried dried chorizo was in Atlanta. But long before I stepped foot in any part of the South, I was eating Mexican chorizo (fresh, spicy ground pork sausage) scrambled with eggs for breakfast back home in the Bay Area. I don't recall a time when my family or I cooked with chorizo except to scramble it with eggs. Culinary creativity was often overlooked in the name of tried-and-true recipes and the speed with which our large family could be fed.

In my small, windowless Atlanta kitchen, the once-mysterious dried chorizo got sliced into three-quarter-inch thick rounds and sauteed in a skillet with yellow onion and garlic to make tacos. Chicken thighs stewed for hours in chicken stock, water, and quartered onions, and later shredded for classic chicken enchiladas. Pork shoulder, braised for half the day and then fried in its own fat for carnitas, is possibly my all-time favorite thing to eat. I put an entire avocado, sliced, on top of all of these dishes.

Cooking Southern food, however, was not something I felt comfortable tackling right away. Fried chicken terrified me. The thought of possibly screwing up this or any classically Southern dish for my Southern boyfriend gave me anxiety. Biscuits, for example, were out of the question, because I was under some impression that making biscuits was hard.

Eventually, I did some research and realized that the most intimidating thing about making biscuits was choosing a biscuit recipe. Everyone has one, and the ingredients and biscuit-making methods and techniques are as varied as the people to whom these treasured recipes belong.

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A lot of biscuit recipes have a tendency to read more like the making of some Harry Potter spell:

"Make sure you cut your butter into the dough using a pastry cutter that has been sitting for hours in moonlight."

"Pat and fold the dough over and onto itself a total of exactly five times, and no more than five times!"

The first example is an exaggeration; the second is not. One woman claimed to use her grandmother's ancient wooden spoon—ONLY—to combine the wet and dry ingredients in her biscuit recipe, and personally, I wouldn't doubt her. There seems to be some superstition involved in biscuit-making, or maybe it's just that powerful notion of tradition, which I have to respect.

I'll add Mexican oregano to my biscuits, I thought one day. I'll make gravy using chorizo! And so I did.

Introducing Mexican flavors to a traditional Southern dish like biscuits and gravy was part creativity, part me using ingredients I was already familiar with. That day, I also taught myself the baking ratios for biscuits so that I could feel free to call my version of biscuits and gravy truly my own. I learned that for every two cups of flour, a half cup of butter is needed (or is a strong suggestion, at least). Some recipes urge you to use a rolling pin, others strongly urge against it. I went with the fact that I still do not own a rolling pin, and simply patted out my biscuit dough.

The real secret here is to grate the butter. In my life, I've made a million pie doughs from scratch using various tools to cut the butter into the dough. I watched my mother, who also had just never gotten around to owning a legit pastry cutter for whatever reason, use two butter knives, and I've done that for years, too.

RECIPE: Mexican Oregano Biscuits

The end result came out to be better than I dreamed. If I had known it would take me roughly seven minutes and very minimal effort from the time I took out all the ingredients to the moment I placed the biscuits in the oven, I would not have spent any time fearing the process.

For this recipe, I encourage the use of leftover chorizo grease to brush on the biscuits both before and after they go in the oven. Butter is obviously a good substitute, as is any way you wish to translate biscuits and gravy. I make biscuits about twice weekly now, and do not need a recipe—or even Southern root—to do it.