It’s interesting to see that Venezuelan chicha is what Mexicans would call horchata and not the various kinds of maize chicha found in other parts of Central and South America.

The ubiquity and variety of drinks called horchata leads one has to conclude that the Spanish were really homesick for their horchata when they arrived in the Americas. I would have thought that there would have been places where chufa would grow. Perhaps not. Another little mystery.

Anyway, over to Mariana.

“In Venezuela, horchata is a traditional beverage, along with Chicha which is more popular (there are several versions of chicha, but the most common is chicha de arroz, made with rice or rice flour, milk, sugar and seasoned with cinnamon).

I live in Maracaibo, a large city, and I remember that being a child, my mother took us to a famous place to have “cepillados” (shaved ice cones), and there also they sold chicha and horchata, this last being sold only in few places. My mother always asked for horchata. I tasted it, but since the flavor is a little bitter, I didn’t like it.

As a grown up, and as with coffee, I learned to appreciate its flavor and now I really love its fragance and untuosity and find it very refreshing in our very hot wheather. Happily, nowadays’ boom of “light” and “healthy” food has made horchata to be popularized, so there are many street vendors who sell “integral” (whole) food (like whole-wheat pastry empanadas), who are offering horchata among other “natural” beverages. (by the way, this is a very recent trend in street-food vending in Maracaibo).

HORCHATA RECIPE (not really sure about proportions because we use to make it “al ojo por ciento”. I can get exact proportions for you afterwards. Anyway it’s a matter of taste. If you prefer a stronger flavor, add more sesame seeds or less water)

1/2 cup of sesame seeds
1.5 lt. of water
sugar or raw cane sugar (in Venezuela we call it “papelón” or “panela” is like the “piloncillo”) at taste.

If using papelón, you can either grind it by hand, “shave” it with a knife, or you can make a syrup by placing it in a pan (of a size just to fit the papelón), adding water just until covering it, and placin it in low heat until the papelón melts.

Slightly toast the sesame seeds, allow to cool
Put the seeds in a blender with a small quantity (1 cup or so) of water. High-speed grind them.
Add the rest of the water and the sweet.
straw it fith a fine straw or a cloth. press to get all the liquid possible
serve cold

(The remaining pulp can be added to breads, pancakes or arepas, it’s a great source of fiber and protein).”

You save cantaloupe seeds (from the cantaloupe you have used for agua de melón, of course).

You rinse off the fibrous bits, and you put them in the sun to dry. You get a bit more than 1/4 cup per canteloupe I find.

Blend these with a cup or so of water. Strain through cheesecloth. Add about four cups of water and sugar to taste. This needs something to perk it up: a bit of cinnamon or lemon.

Or do as Alfredo does in his interesting blog and add some cantaloupe juice. And check out his pretty horchata de arroz with pink sugar on the rim of the glass.

Well, for Mexico I think that leaves just coconut horchata to go. But perhaps not. There’s always another horchata around the corner.

The morro grows on a wide-branched tree, part of the calabash family. The small, gourdlike fruit stands out because it is attached directly to the tree’s trunk and branches. For farming families, morro trees were a prominent part of the landscape.

The black, lentil-shaped seeds are the tree’s coveted treasure. Pried from the fruit’s pulp, “they are put in the sun to dry and then they’re ready to be ground,” Velasquez says. The resulting powder is blended with water to make horchata.”

Here’s the link to full article by Joel Denker in the Washington Post.  And here’s a description of morro (Crescentia alata).

Well, here’s the answer.

This 1860 oil by a wonderful Mexican painter, José Agustín Arrieta, shows horchata vendors. The girl behind the table is pouring horchata into a glass. Also shown are the mechanics of this. On the left is a water seller presumably delivering the water to make the horchata. On the right is a young girl kneeling behind her metate (grindstone). Given the pineapple and pineapple tops scattered about she has actually been grinding pineapple, not rice. The pulp would have run off into a bowl like the one at the bottom of the metate. And she is straining the pulp of a pineapple into another bowl.

Very hard work but much more effective than, say, trying to push rice or pineapple through a sieve.

Let’s begin with her commentary or at least a translation of it.

“This ‘horchata’ is the one that is typically served with tacos al pastor here in Guadalajara.

It is a horchata that is not horchata since it does not include rice or dried seed of melon.

I mix the first four ingredients and I tint it so that has a pink color. If you add too much color it is not appetizing. Before serving I add the ice in order to avoid diluting the flavor. It’s ideal for children’s parties.”

Something to consider next time you have a children’s party. Here’s her ingredient list.

1 garrafón of water (20 liters)

8 cans of evaporated milk

2 kilograms of sugar

1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract

Red food coloring

1/2 bag of ice

A little bird tells me that there’s probably evaporated or condensed milk in a lot of the creamy, milky horchatas that Alex mentions. And Bob Mrotek remarks that his mother-in-law uses condensed milk.

And luckily my long-standing buddy Ken Albala who is the expert on such things has just posted on almond milk and butter on his blog.  Well worth a gander.  As well as the rest of the blog and his multitudinous books.

This simple recipe is adapted from one in El Gran Libro de la Cocina Mexicana: La Práctica (Larousse, 1993) by two of the great exponents of Mexican cooking, Alicia Gironella de’Angeli and Jorge De’Angeli. It uses lime to heighten the flavor.

For 2 quarts of agua de cebada, cook 4 tablespoons of barley in water until it is tender. Blend with half a cup of water. Add 1/3 cup of lime juice and sieve. Add water to make up 2 liters and add sugar to taste. Chill and serve cold.

Well, the afternoon of the 4th July seems like a good time to post about horchata de chufa. It would make a perfect drink to go along with a picnic on the 4th, even though it has no American credentials whatsoever. Or perhaps you’d better stick to iced tea or lemonade or beer.

My first taste of horchata de chufa was a couple of years ago. I’d spent a placid day poking around Alicante on the south coast of Spain–the old town, the regular market (fascinating), the weekly market (a disappointment), the FNAC store for books, a series of five and ten cent stores–while my husband was off talking with the big law school there about problems in legal epistemology. The sun was setting, my feet were aching, and I still had not found the horchata I was looking for. As I made my way back to the hotel along the promenade dodging one of those dizzying inset patterns that give you slight vertigo that the Spanish seem to favor (and that are fun), there was a nineteenth century green stand selling ice cream and horchata.

A tall squishy plastic glass in hand I sat and sipped. Heaven. This is one of the world’s great drinks, rich, creamy, slightly almondy, light years better than Mexican rice versions, delicious as those are. It was a pity it was not in a traditional horchateria though relaxing among the townspeople under the trees looking out to the Mediterranean was nothing to complain about either.

Chufa (or tiger nut) as it’s called in English is a nodule that grows on the roots of a kind of sedge, probably originally from somewhere in the Near East. If you read Spanish, here’s an informative page on the how chufa is grown commercially on 540 hectares in Valencia, Spain. And here’s one in English on its use in the US in the last century for fattening pigs and now for wildlife havens ( I do rather doubt its claim that chufa is widely available in Mexico).

I’ll spare you the multitude of links to pseudo histories of chufa/horchata in which king’s daughters squeal various improbable phrases that supposedly gave birth to the name. Instead here’s the official denomination of origin site.

If you want to experiment with making this nectar and live in the US, here’s a source where you can buy chufa, at a price, of course. I did read somewhere that it’s widely used for feeding carp, a bit of a waste, I’d say, though I’m sure the carp are happy as can be. You’d have to use your own judgment about whether such sources were safe. I brought back a stash from Barcelona. This is what they look like.

I have adjusted a recipe given by Lourdes March and Alicia Rios, impeccable sources for Spanish cuisine, in the magnificently illustrated Heritage of Spanish Cooking (1992).

Take 8 oz of chufa nuts, rinse them well, and soak them overnight in water. They will soften and swell a little but don’t expect the dramatic changes you see with beans. The following day, drain off the water, and put the nuts in the blender with 4 cups of water. Give them a good long whirl.

Then drain them through a sieve into a pitcher.

Add a little sugar and taste. They may benefit from just a touch of cinnamon and lemon to heighten the flavor. Tip the sieved bits back into the blender, add the lemon or lime and piece of cinnamon stick if you want, and whirl and sieve again. I repeat this a third time because I don’t want to waste any of the precious extract.

Adjust seasonings, chill well, serve, find a lovely, calm place with a great view to sit, and sigh.

I’m beginning here because although horchata is one of my favorite agua frescas, it’s not one I ever seem to make really well at home. So I thought I’d try four different versions. Here are the results.

From left to right:

1. An horchata made with boiled rice

2. An horchata made with soaked raw rice, the commonest method I believe

3. An horchata made with rice flour

4. An horchata made with a commercial mix

To make the first horchata of boiled rice, I used the recipe in Melissa Guerra’s wonderful book Dishes from the Wild Horse Dessert. Melissa’s family and her husband’s too have ranched along the Rio Grande for centuries, they have family ties both sides of the border, are bilingual, and they know and love their culinary traditions.

For 2 quarts of horchata, Melissa suggests boiling 1/2 cup rice and a stick of cinnamon for half an hour in 2 quarts water.

Remove the cinnamon stick and blend adding extra water to make up for what has boiled away, and then add sugar to taste (between 1/2 and a full cup).

To make the second horchata of soaked rice, I took the recipe from Josefina Velázquez de Leon‘s Cocina Oaxaqueña (1984). Josefina Velázquez, as many of you may know, is worth of a post all on her own. From a distinguished family and widowed after a year of marriage, from the 1940s, she taught Mexican cooking to young ladies and published literally dozens of cookbooks under her own imprint. They remain a fundamental resource for Mexican cuisine.

For quart, she suggest soaking 1/4 lb of rice overnight, blending it with a small strip of cinnamon, sieving it through a cloth, and adding half a pound of sugar.

Here’s the soaked rice in the blender.

And here it is whirling away.

To make the third of ground rice, I followed the instructions on a box of rice flour that suggested blending a cup of milk with a tablespoon of rice flour and cinnamon and then adding water to make a liter.

Here is the happy illustration.

Finally for the fourth, I just used a commercial mix, adding one part of the mix to six parts of water and stirring. It took a few seconds to get the thick mixture of sugar, rice, cinnamon, and vanilla to blend with the water.

Results

The horchata made with commercial mix tasted fairly strongly of vanilla. If you like vanilla, you might find this satisfactory but it’s not my favorite flavor. The horchata made with ground rice was a lovely white color but that was due to the milk because the rice did not stay suspended in the mix at all. It tasted strongly of milk. Again perhaps fine if you like drinking milk.

The soaked rice produced as it always does a horchata that tended to separate and that needed to be stirred. When stirred it is an appealing white color and has a faint chalky taste and texture which I happen to find appealing.

The boiled rice also tended to separate and was more greyish than bright white. It tasted good though and I would happily alternate these last two methods.