The perfect moment for vegan tacos
LA’s love affair with the Mexican meat staple is taking a thoroughly modern turn
On a recent Saturday morning, chef and writer Jocelyn Ramirez faced the camera on her laptop, dug her hands into a bowl of pale, unripe jackfruit, and pulled it apart with her fingers for a rapt audience on Zoom.
“It’s a foundation,” Ramirez said. “It’s a blank canvas.” Her business, Todo Verde, has catered weddings and parties, and sold vegan tacos and fresh juices at local farmers markets for years.
Ramirez, who recently published the cookbook La Vida Verde, studied vegan cooking after her father’s second diagnosis of cancer. She quickly learned that although unripe jackfruit doesn’t taste like much, once it’s stained with a paste of achiote seeds and chillies, soaked with orange and pineapple juices, generously seasoned and crisped in a castiron pan, it transforms.
The fruit’s soft, shredded petal-like pieces take on a crisp-edged texture, as if they’ve been browned on a vertical spit. This is to say, in the hands of a good cook, a jackfruit taco can take on the best qualities of a juicy taco al pastor.
This past spring, taqueros across Los Angeles were forced to change their purchasing habits day to day, shifting to different meats or cuts, rewriting their menus as needed, some going partly or temporarily vegetarian.
Alex Garcia and Elvia Huerta of Evil Cooks took carne asada off the menu when beef prices tripled, soaring from less than US$3 (about 95 baht) for 450g to more than $9. And the habits they formed early on during the supply-chain breakdown have stuck. When beef prices levelled out again, Garcia and Huerta didn’t go back to buying it. Garcia, who started cooking and eating more vegetarian food to help manage his diabetes, found that under the restrictions of the pandemic, he and Huerta had an opportunity to push their ideas forward.
“I think, right now, people are being more experimental,” Huerta said.
Street vendors are marginalised and unprotected, and generally more vulnerable than workers at brick-andmortar restaurants. But they do have one small and unlikely situational advantage during the pandemic — their businesses are tiny, nimble and already modelled around workers who cook safely in the outdoors, and diners who eat quickly outdoors or carry the food to go.
Garcia and Huerta used to travel all over LA, setting up their kitchen out of a small black van covered with stickers. But since the first lockdown in Los Angeles, they’ve become a stationary enterprise, assembling a tent in their front yard in El Sereno, a neighbourhood east of downtown.
Like most taqueros, they fly signs outside, and theirs are decorated with illustrations and cheerfully goth copy, like a highly self-aware metal band. They hype the dishes they’re best known for: green chorizo tacos and black tacos al pastor, as well as dessert tacos filled with flan and crisp churros, carefully seasoned and beautifully garnished.
In the past, their style has been met with cynicism.
“A lot of traditional people said we want to gentrify Mexican food,” said Garcia, who was born in Celaya, in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. “But I tell them, black pastor comes from Yucatán. It is traditional!”
Chef Roberto Solís established the style in Mérida, using the Mayan-style spice paste recado negro on a vertical spit known as a trompo. To make his own version, Garcia slowly and thoroughly blackens chillies, which form the base along with burned tortillas and cacao. Garcia and Huerta have applied it to pork (traditional) and to soy (a bit less traditional) and also to vegetables.
Their latest vegan trompo is made from napa cabbage, mushrooms, eggplant and onion, immersed in the recado negro, stacked and compressed to form a dark minaret, then slowly turned by the fire so the finest layer of crackle and char can develop.
Vegetarian and vegan taco fillings aren’t new. You can trace their lineage back through indigenous cuisines, and the cooks who worked with regional flowers, fruits and vegetables, long before the introduction of pork, by colonists.
The genre has a history in Los Angeles, too. Plant Food For People started selling jackfruit carnitas a decade ago, and in 2018, the vegan tacos from Taqueria La Venganza won a fierce citywide taco competition hosted by a local publication, L.A. Taco, beating out more well-known meat tacos.
In June, Alex Vargas of Vegatinos opened El Cocinero Restaurant, in the San Fernando Valley. And this week, Stephanie Villegas, who runs the pop-up Xochitl Vegan, will open a kitchen in a corner store in East Los Angeles.
Villegas had been working as a make-up artist at Nordstrom and started making grilled hibiscus tacos about three years ago when her hours at the beauty counter were cut. She read as much as she could about the history of cooking with the flower, which can soak up flavours like a sponge when it’s rehydrated, and can have a pleasingly soft and chewy texture.
“But at first it was too bitter, or it was too sour or too rubbery,” she said. “When I messed around with how many times I boiled it, and when I put the hibiscus flowers in an asada marinade, then I just fell in love with it.”
Villegas named her business after the word for flower in Nawat, an indigenous language spoken by her mother’s side of the family, who come from El Salvador. She started with a pop-up in Leimert Park, in South Los Angeles, and expanded her menu beyond hibiscus as she saw more and more demand for vegan foods.
At her new location, she’ll serve tacos, pupusas and veggie burgers, as well as vegan chorizo — the chubby links packed in a fine, starchy casing, made not from meat but from walnuts, lentils and a variety of raw nuts and seeds, which create the hodgepodge texture of a coarsely ground sausage and brown nicely in a hot pan.