TASTY TIMES IN TUCSON
Arizona’s ‘City of Gastronomy’ offers world-class Mexican menu
In the 1980s, the Sonoran hotdog arrived in Tucson, imported from roadside stands in Mexico. The essential ingredient — a wiener — is wrapped in bacon, grilled and placed in the bun with avocado and pin to beans creating a 6.8 on the napkin/messy scale and a solid 10 on the delicious one.
In1922, the story goes, theowner of Tucson restaurant El Charro cursed in Spanish when she accidentally dropped a burrito into the deep fryer, simultaneously inventing and naming the Chimichanga. The Chimi, as they’re known in Tucson, have since become a staple of southwest cuisine.
A little earlier in Tucson culinary history, about the same time the Druids were putting the final touches on Stonehenge, farmers in the desert started digging irrigation ditches and planting crops.
“Tucson has the longest agricultural history of any city in the United States of America,” reports UNESCO, which has recognized the 4,000 years of continuous agriculture — give or take the odd bad crop — by naming Tucson the first “City of Gastronomy” in the U.S.
Tucsonans celebrated the 2015 designation by going out for soft tacos and putting up pretty purple signs around town that boast of Tucson’s “23 Miles of Mexican Food.”
That ( almost) marathon of Mexican covers everything from scoops of guacamole served on paper plates to rich mole sauces on china atop white linen.
The UNESCO nod also recognizes programs and policies that encourage local food production in Tucson. The Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project, forexample, is reviving fruit orchards that have fallen barren since Spanish missionaries first planted them. “When you eat a quince that was brought by the Europeans 300 years ago, you are actually tasting history,” says Jesus Garcia, an ethnobotanist at the Arizona- Sonora Desert Museum who spearheads the tree planting project. “You have this blend of all world culture that still remains here and is part of us.”
As well as planting orchards, Garcia gives presentations at the museum about the ancient bounty that’s growing in the desert, what he calls the “Sonoran Supermarket.” Local chefs are increasingly shopping there to serve up tepary bean hummus, fresh bread made of heritage wheat or syrup made from Saguaro cactus blossoms.
“There’s a lot of food out there, you just need to know where to pick it and how to prepare it,” says Phyliss Valenzuela as she walks through the fields of San Xavier Co-op Farm on the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation, 10 minutes west of Tucson.
The 1,500-acre farm, just over the hill from the 17th century Mission San Xavier del Bac, produces plenty of mesquite, tepary beans, cowpeas, corn and chilies — food that has been growing in the Sonoran Desert for millennia.
Valenzuela gives tours of the farm and takes school groups into the kitchen to show them how to cook with things like Cholla buds, the little knobs that grow all over the desert on Cholla cactus. “Some say ‘ We’ve never tasted this before, we’ve never eaten it.’ And I say ‘It’s in your backyard!’ ” It’s also lining the shelves of the farm’s store. You can pick up sweet mesquite flour and soup mixes made of beans and Cholla buds (which taste a little like asparagus and pack a punch of calcium). Valenzuela grew up learning about traditional food from her grandmother. “I tell the kids ‘ You guys are the ones who are going to be here, so you can carry on the tradition.’ ”
While Tucsonans rediscover old culinary traditions while building new ones, such as food trucks selling ramen burgers and craft brew houses serving panko-crusted avocado fries, visitors happily raise their prickly pear margaritas to toast those long ago farmers who planted the first crops, as well as contemporary chefs who keep making gastronomic history.