Pulpo al Tikinxic Holbox

Tikinxic is a Yucatecan technique. The word is Mayan: tikin means dry, xic means wing or fin, the dish of a fish dried and rubbed with recado rojo and grilled over an open fire wrapped in banana leaf. In Merida and along the coast of Yucatan state, tikinxic is grouper or snapper. In Quintana Roo, on the island of Holbox where the small-boat fishermen pull octopus from the Gulf and the Caribbean meets the Gulf at a sandbar you can walk across, the technique gets put on pulpo. Same recado. Same banana leaf. Different animal. This is what the peninsula does: it takes one principle and adapts it to whatever the sea is giving that week.

The recado rojo is the spine of the dish. Achiote, sour orange, garlic, oregano, allspice, black pepper, cumin, salt, and lard. Eight ingredients and a blender. Do not bring me a marinade with lemon juice and paprika and call it tikinxic. Naranja agria is the sour orange of the peninsula and you can substitute, the formula is in the ingredients, but understand that you are substituting. A substitution is a compromise, not an upgrade. The achiote paste has to be the real Yucatecan kind, sold in red bricks at the mercados in Merida, Valladolid, and Chetumal, made by women who have been blending the same recado for forty years.

The octopus has to be poached first. This is not optional. You cannot grill a raw octopus and get tender meat; you will get rubber. The pescadores in Holbox poach it in seawater with onion and bay leaf until a knife slides into the tentacle, then it goes onto the marinade, then onto the grill over a banana leaf, where the achiote caramelizes into a dark red crust and the suckers go crisp at the edges. The smoke from the banana leaf below and the fire above are doing two different jobs and you need both. La cocina no es decoracion, es trabajo. This is dinner-party food in Holbox the way pozole is Sunday food in Jalisco: a coastal cuisine showing off what its own water makes possible. Cada estado, su propia cocina.