Cumin/other spices

Dried chilies

Meat

Cheese

Tortillas

Tomatoes

Cilantro

Onion

Are things that are widely grown or produced anywhere in the United States, or are easily transported anywhere in the United States.

A better question is what FRESH ingredients are not available in the United States that are critical to Mexican cuisine?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44790950)

do you have to bring a mexican with you to order off a secret menu at these taco trucks or what? people rave about this stuff but it always seems mediocre to me

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44788966)

It’s central americans doing a bad imitation of Mexican food

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44789017)

They also do good sausages. We think the only good sausages come from Germany and Italy, but the Spanish had their own tradition that Latin Americans picked up. It was actually a German friend of mine who alerted me that Puerto Ricans make good sausage.

https://www.meatsandsausages.com/sausage-recipes/fresh/caribbean/longaniza-puerto-rican

Annatto is magic. I don't understand it because I think it's mostly just a colorant, but it also has flavor that you don't get in American cuisine, even when we import it from counties that use annatto. I've never had success with the annatto I buy at the stores here. You probably have to grind it fresh.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44792784)

Mexican food also suffers from the white trash phenomenon of expecting a shit load of a portion of cheap bad food. Like the shitty Chinese places

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44789011)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44789015)

Mexicans themselves will tolerate some pretty bad shit so even in huge enclaves of them it can be hard to find a good place. Like you might find a good taco van in woodburn, oregon but you won't find a good burrito place or whatever

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44789499)

It’s absolutely disgusting.

Some Tex-Mex restaurants in Texas actually serve up their marinated skirt steak with a shit ton of butter as a premium steak meal at $100/head. Seriously. Taking a family of four out for a fajita dinner in Houston will run about $400.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44790018)

The retarded takes in this thread are astounding

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44790029)

What they did not have was sugar, or even honey as we know it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44792934)

Also, does Mole even have cacao in it? Or is it just shit?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44793027)

To understand mexican food I think you have to know (and appreciate!) what crops are indigenous to mexico, and which ones aren't. Cocoa and peppers were domesticated in Mexico but they never had any kind of sugar. Beans come in wider varieties than we have here and are used more sparingly. Same with tomatos. Rice isn't an indigenous food at all, nor is any kind of dairy. So when you get your mexican food and it comes with a side of rice and beans with shredded cheese, you can just ignore that shit. Pigs and cattle were introduced from Europe, but they ate some chicken-like birds before we gave them actual chickens (which were domesticated in Asia). They ate more cactus than we do today.

They also gave us avocados. "Avocado," "chili," "tomato" and "chocolate" are all aztec words. Avocado is actually the aztec word for testicle. Pineapples were domesticated further south but heavily cultivated in precolonial Mexico. Potatoes were also domesticated a little south of Mexico but later grown to some extent in southern mexico.

But also, as I've pointed out elsewhere ITT, they still to this day eat totally different "corn" than we do. I don't think it's right to even call it corn. It's maize. It's white, not yellow. The kernels are hard as fuck and need to be chemically modified to become edible, at which point they become more nutritious than yellow corn. In the USA, we do not allow this kind of corn to be grown for human consumption. We grow all this fucking Mexican corn, but you're only allowed to feed it to chickens and cattle. If you serve it at a restaurant you go to jail. Also, huilachoche is DELICIOUS (I say this coming from grandparents who harvested their own wild mushrooms) but in the US we treat it as a crop disease. If you can find a place in town that serves "huitlacoche" it's some decked out expensive shithold that thins out its huitlacoche with mushrooms because actual huitlacoche is expensive as fuck up here and Americans can't tell it apart from mushrooms anyway.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44793345)

there's a reason tacos are popular, everything else is flame

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44792738)

Here's another easy example: tempeh. Shitlibs sell this packaged shit at the store they claim is "tempeh." Sure enough, it's fermented soybean cake, but take a look at the soybeans and they look like the same big fatass soybeans you get when you eat edamame. Because they are. US farmers aren't used to Americans eating soybeans in any identifiable form, so they only grow these kinds of "edible" soybeans in limited quantities, and they only grow one kind.

When you get tempeh in Indonesia, you get one of about 4000 different dishes people call "tempeh." Sure enough you'll find soybeans of some sort in there, but how they were cooked, what they taste like, what kind of texture they are, and what percent of the dish they compose all vary widely. It's also such a common side dish (rarely the main show) that you get used to seeing it everywhere, and it's always interesting to see what people in different parts of Indonesia are doing with their tempeh.

This shit they sell as "tempeh" in America has the flavor/consistency of a pressure treated shit log. It doesn't matter how you cook it, it will always come out tasting like this bitter gummy mess. To the extent that it tastes like any food you can recall, it tastes vaguely like those soy nuts they sell at the gas station, because it's inevitably made out of the exact same type of soybean. You can't do anything with this. You can't make "tempeh" where the individual soybeans are just these tiny crunchy little things mixed in with a bunch of hot peppers and salted minnows. Cant eat that shit as a snack like popcorn.

Another Indonesian dish you cannot make in America is rawon. The best fuckin beef stew on earth is made with something called "keluak" and "candlenut" broth. The broth comes out midnight black but the candlenut oil forms this delicious buttery sheen on the top. Now try to find candlenuts or keluak for sale in the USA. Raw keluak is poisonous and probably illegal to sell. These are actual nuts like almonds and macademia nuts, just as delicious and versatile, and you'll never taste either one let alone taste them together with beef and shallots.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44793459)

Not cooking like a manly RANCHERO in DURANGO but rather some inbred 4 foot FOB with 5 kids who only speaks Mayan is why the mexican food is so bad in the east coasts.

Throw in the insufferable libs who condone this shit and you have a steaming pile of mexican dogshit food that you find on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.

That Birria truck notwithstanding because he cooks LIKE A MANLY RANCHERO.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44790355)

There's a lot of shit you just can't get here too. Literally ALL the corn we grow for human consumption is sweet corn, but Mexicans use nixtamalized field corn. In the US, field corn is only grown for animal feed and is generally not considered fit for human consumption. Furthermore the Mexican process for making it edible requires labor and capital, and why bother when Dupont GMO corn is so sweet you can eat it raw? It's hard as fuck too find tortillas made with field corn in the USA, and when you see it it's often some whole foods garbage marketed to shrews for $8.99. Most likely it will be nixtamalized sweet corn and the tortillas will fall apart when you try to eat them.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44792893)

And there is plenty of shitty mexican food in Texas and (especially) California

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44792719)

The actual tacos you get in Mexico are tiny and cost like 25 cents. For $3 you can just eat these little tacos till you explode. It's like telling someone you're serving them an "authentic" hamburger and then giving them sliders. Their initial reaction is going to be disappointment. To make an American happy with authentic Mexican tacos. You're going to have to give them at least five, and each one is made with TWO tortillas. So that's 10 fucking tortillas you gotta make for one white customer who won't even notice the difference, and who will insist on adding sour cream and shredded cheese and diced tomatoes anyway. Then you got bitches who want shrimp in their tacos, or beans because they are vegan

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44793226)

You don’t know what the fuck you are talking about and you are a legit retsrd if you eat the cheap tacos in Mexico, enjoy food poisoning .

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44796714)

but even many of the relatively well-reviewed places in california are undermined by using crap ingredients. and many of the well-reviewed places in california that actually earned it would still be a lot better if they weren't cutting corners on ingredient quality. la taqueria is very good to excellent, but would still be much better if they were using e.g. high-quality flank or skirt steak for asada (and at the prices now charged there, they should be, although of course the other costs associated with running a restaurant in that area might prevent doing so).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5145707&forum_id=2#44819015)