Healthy Recipe Collection

Mexican foods are cooked similar to how you cook your everyday meals. They can be fried, boiled, and grilled. Mexico has cooked their foods differently in the past.

In ancient times, Mexicans did not have ovens. Instead, they would cook Mexican food over an open fire, which was the most common out of all the Mexican traditional cooking techniques.

They would hold the foods in iron pots and pans. It cooked like how we grill our foods on the barbeque. Before the Spaniards introduced the iron pots, the Aztecs used to steam and boil foods in two-handled clay pots, which were called xoctli. The pot was filled with the food and heated over a fire. Frying foods was a popular way to cook. Many Mexican dishes still use this method.

It is a lot easier to cook Mexican food today than in was in the past. It takes less time both to prepare the food, because of superior cooking utensils, and to cook it. If you want to know how to cook Mexican food, there are various cooking methods, some of which were unknown in ancient Mexican times. If you want to make homemade tortillas, for example, you can use a flat-bottomed iron pan. Flan is a Mexican dessert, which is made in a spring form pan. Many years ago, the Mexicans had to make masa, which is a corn ground by hand. These days you can buy a metal grinder to do the work for you.

The oven is perfect for making many Mexican foods. It makes cooking vegetables and meats a snap. They can be placed in a pot of water with added spices and simmered for hours. Bigger steaming pots make tamales easier to cook. You can make many tamales and steam them all at once, making it very convenient. Tamales take a long time to make, so big pots are perfect.

Grilling on the barbeque is also a great way to taste authentic Mexican foods. Long ago foods were made this way and called Barbacoa. It consisted of steaming meat that was suspended over boiling water in a deep pit. Before steaming the meat, cactus and banana leaves were wrapped around it. These days, barbequing allows the spices and sauces to burst with flavor. It tastes similar to how the food once was cooked over open flames. Fajitas are great on the grill!

Mexicans many years ago used “metate y mano,” which was a large tool with a concave surface, made from stone or lava rock. This utensil was used to mash the ingredients together. A “molcajete” is another ancient Mexican cooking tool, which translates as a mortar and pestle. You would learn about these ancient cooking tools in a Mexican cooking class, although we use different utensils today.

Cooking almost always requires stirring somewhere in the preparation. Wooden spoons have been around for many hundreds of years and are still widely used. There are different types of spoons today, depending on whether you are moving meat around in hot oil or stirring a thick sauce.

There is a rich history behind Mexican food and Mexican traditional cooking techniques. The methods might have changed through the ages but the food is still traditional. Food tastes different when cooked in different ways and there are plenty of Mexican recipes to try out and enjoy.