Cuitlacoche Estilo Costeño

Oaxacan Coast, Mexico — recorded by Diana Kennedy in My Mexico (1998), p. 417.

A deeply savory, earthy filling from the Oaxacan coast built around cuitlacoche — the blue-black corn fungus (Ustilago maydis) that swells on ears of field corn during the rainy season. Kennedy presents the costeño approach as notably direct: no tomato, no onion, no long mole-style construction. The fungus is ground raw with garlic, toasted dried chiles, and epazote, then fried down into a concentrated, almost meaty paste. The result is intensely umami-forward, with the smoke of the toasted chiles sharpening the fungus's characteristic mushroom-and-corn depth. Costeño chiles (Capsicum annuum) are the preferred choice along that coastal corridor; chiles de árbol carry similar heat and work as a practical stand-in. This paste is used cold, packed into fresh masa empanadas before they are pressed and toasted or fried.

The paste smells of rain-wet corn and forest floor, with a sharp, resinous smoke from the toasted costeño chiles cutting through the fungus's heady, mineral richness. On the palate it is dense and almost meaty — glutamate-saturated in the way of a long-reduced broth — with epazote's piney, slightly medicinal edge arriving in the finish. As the filling sets in the pan it tightens into something closer to a concentrated tapenade than a sauce, coating the mouth with a lingering, earthy warmth.