San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tacos de canasta hit the Mission
A cook turns to Mexico City’s popular steamed version in a difficult time
Walk down Mission and you’ll find street food vendors dishing out delicious fare everywhere. Whether it’s the churro lady on 24th Street outside BART, the elote man cutting piping hot corn off the cob curbside on 23rd or the pupusa people prepping masa into fragrant flat discs on a plancha farther down toward 22nd, there’s just so much — and that’s just in a twoblock stretch.
One pandemic day a few months ago, I noticed an addition to the Mission on 21st Street: a mustachioed man named Felipe Reyes slinging tacos out of a little blue cooler. Reyes had been let go from his job as a cook at one of the fastcasual concepts in San Francisco, and in order to pay the bills, he simply did what he knew best: He cooked.
But Reyes wasn’t offering any plain old taco; he was selling tacos de canasta, or basket tacos.
Tacos de canasta are a special type of steamed taco found throughout Mexico City that likely have their origins farther east in Tlaxcala. Corn tortillas are filled with different guisados (stews or other homey dishes) such as chicharron (pressed pork rinds), frijoles (beans) or papas (potatoes), then arranged and layered inside a basket.
Reyes grew up eating these tacos back in Mexico City, and he realized that he couldn’t find them in San Francisco. He saw an opportunity.
He makes 240 of these tacos per day, six days a week. By himself. He starts around 3 or 4 p.m. on the day before serving, making six guisados: chicharron, chorizo con papa, mole con pollo, tinga de pollo, frijoles and frijoles con chorizo. His meats are never frozen because he says the ice leaches out flavor; he never uses canned pinto beans because he detests preservatives.
The next morning at 6:30 a.m., he prepares his salsa, a complex roasted tomatillo salsa with five types of chiles. Then it’s on to the taco assembly, where Reyes truly is an innovator. Typically, the tacos are given a splash of hot chileinfused oil then immediately sealed with blue plastic to trap the steam, which keeps the tacos warm throughout the day. (The blue is both traditional and symbolic, according to a legend described in the canasta episode of “Taco Chronicles” on Netflix: The Tlaxcalan gods asked for a dish in which the blue sky would be reflected, but since the Tlaxcalan people didn’t find anything, “they offered the tacos wrapped in a blue blanket.”)
But instead of giving the whole tacos a bath in hot oil, Reyes first dips the tortillas in oil infused with guajillo chile and garlic that gives them an orange hue, then gently fries them on a comal until they’re warm.“I don’t like too much fat,” Reyes tells me in Spanish.
He then stuffs the tortillas with the guisados that he rewarms (they get better overnight, he says) before placing the tacos into a cooler lined with blue plastic. “The cooler helps maintain a constant temperature in San Francisco, whose climate can vary every day,” says Reyes. He tops each layer of tacos with slices of onion that he cooks with a bit of oil and oregano until soft.
He’s out the door by 10 a.m. and hits Mission Street, where he usually sells out by around 12:30 p.m. The soft tacos cost $1.50 and are extremely crushable. The chicharron shouldn’t be missed: It’s savory, slightly spicy and texturally complex with little bits of pressed pork skin mixed in with melted meat — it’s his best seller.
Taco connoisseurs might think tacos de canasta are similar to tacos al vapor, and they’d be correct in that they’re both steamed; the difference is in the vessel. Whereas tacos de canasta steam in a basket, tacos al vapor are cooked in a metal steam tray outfitted with holes — the same trays often used to cook certain cuts of meat like beef cabeza (head) and lengua (tongue).
Taco experts might also know about tacos sudados (sweaty tacos), which are a type of tacos de canasta. The difference is in the order of operations in the preparation: For sudados, the tortillas are dipped in hot oil before stuffing, then steamed prior to placing in a basket, according to Ricardo Muñoz Zurita’s “Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mexican Gastronomy.” Reyes’ taco technique technically blends sudados with canasta with an added step of heating the tortillas on the comal, thus giving his tacos a bit more structure while still staying meltinyourmouth soft.
In Mexico City, the taco baskets are commonly affixed to the back of bikes so that roving taqueros can peddle tacos while pedaling around town. Reyes, too, roves; unlike most of the Mission Street vendors, he doesn’t stay in one spot. Catch him if you can.
What I admire about Reyes, other than his entrepreneurship and work ethic, is his gratitude. “Mil gracias a todos” he’ll often say on his social media. In 2002, his kidneys failed, and for seven years he was getting blood pumped from his arteries. He eventually got a kidney transplant, and he has been on medication ever since. The man works for three reasons: his rent, his medical bills and the family he can’t even see. His daughters, still in Mexico City, are now 36, 32 and 21. He has missed seeing them grow up and has grandchildren he’s never met in person, but he talks to them every day on the phone and still sends them money.
When I think of my pandemic problems, I think how frustrating it is that I can’t go on a vacation or see my family in Southern California. Reyes’ story makes me grateful for what I have.
But I worry for him. I worry that the health department will shut him down. I worry about his health. But Reyes doesn’t seem too concerned and instead leaves it up to a higher power, often saying: “Que dios me lo bendiga y protega.”
“May God bless and protect me.”
Amen, Felipe. Amen.
Tacos de Canasta. Wednesday to Monday, usually starting at 10 a.m. until sold out (typically by 1 p.m.), on Mission Street between 20th and 24th streets.