Tacos de Tasajo del Pasillo de Humo

This is Oaxaca. Specifically, this is the Pasillo de Humo inside Mercado 20 de Noviembre in the city of Oaxaca de Juarez, the corridor of smoke where a dozen grill stations work side by side over charcoal and the air is so thick with woodsmoke and rendered fat that your clothes carry the smell for the rest of the day. You buy your meat from one vendor, hand it to a grillera at the next stall, and she cooks it over coals while you sit at a shared table with tortillas, salsa, and cebollitas already waiting. That is the system. That is the dish.

Tasajo is thin-cut salted beef, sliced from the leg against the grain, opened flat like a page, salted, and hung to dry for a few hours until the surface is tacky and the salt has pulled moisture from the fibers. It is not jerky. It is not fully dried. It sits somewhere between fresh beef and cecina, with just enough cure to concentrate the flavor and firm the texture so it can take the heat of a charcoal grill without curling into nothing. In Oaxaca, every butcher in the market sells tasajo already prepared. Outside Oaxaca, you make your own. The technique is simple. The knife work takes practice.

The salsa that belongs to this dish is made with chile pasilla oaxaqueño, the smoked chile that is grown and dried in the Sierra Mixe and the Sierra Norte. Do not confuse it with the chile pasilla negro that you find in Mexico City markets. They share a name. They share nothing else. The pasilla oaxaqueño is smoke-dried over wood, and that smoke is the backbone of this salsa. Charred on the comal with garlic and tomatillo, ground in a molcajete, it produces a salsa that tastes like the Pasillo de Humo itself.

I first ate these tacos at the market when I was twenty-three, on my first research trip to Oaxaca. The grillera didn't ask me how I wanted my tasajo cooked. She put it on the coals, flipped it once, pulled it off, and handed it to me on a clay plate with a stack of tortillas and a molcajete of salsa that made my eyes water. I ate four tacos standing up. I wrote the salsa recipe in my notebook that afternoon, and the woman who gave it to me told me: "The chile has to be pasilla oaxaqueño or don't bother." She was right. Cada estado, su propia cocina.