Recently left our beloved Acapulco and we took a trip southward to Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca. While we were there we ate some really good food, all with meat that came from a local butcher. It was so good we actually delayed leaving by a few hours to stop and spend some pesos on meat to smuggle back, and we’re glad we did. I’ll share recipes for everything I’ve made with the meat, so you can get a gist of what’s available here! They had in house made Italian style sausage, so this recipe is a sort of Italian style sausage sandwich served on Mexican Buyo buns.
Here’s a shot of the sausage, all sliced up. We used about a pound of it total, sliced into half inch slices. I got 2 kilos of the sausage, at 95 pesos a kilogram, less than 5 dollars for in house made sausage.
Ingredients:
1 lb Italian sausage
3 T butter
1.5 c cherry tomatoes
1/2 medium sized white onion
1 handful fresh basil leaves, chopped
1 handful fresh tomato leaves, chopped
Garlic powder and salt to taste
Started by cooking the sausage and onions in a few tablespoons of butter until it was evenly cooked and browned.
I added water, chopped cherry tomatoes, a little garlic powder and salt and allowed it to reduce while I got the buns from the local miscelanea.
It should look like this before some more water is added.
I used tomato leaves to enhance the tomato flavor as I used cherry tomatoes, and it really worked. I also used basil as it’s perfect for the flavor profile.
Add the herbs and simmer down until the sauce is thick around the meat.
It should look something like this. I grilled the bread on a pan on each side and added shredded Parmesan cheese on top. A buyo is a Mexican buttery burger bun with sesame seeds on top, one of my favorites especially when grilled on a pan with butter. Top that with the meat mixture and more cheese and the sandwich is ready to eat.
It was a lot better than I expected, as Mexican renditions of Italian flavors do not always work out as intended. The flavors are reminiscent of Italian sausage while having something else to offer, which makes it delicious and unique. I’m fairly certain the difference is due to a chilè they used, probably improvising as they may not have had the Italian chilè available.
It reminded me of the Chaldean sausage I used to get from the local butcher in Detroit. I loved that butcher in Detroit because you’d walk in and it smelled amazing. Between the curry spices and the sausage and meat smoker in the back, the place was deliciously aromatic. The meat was affordable and they had things like lamb available which made them all the more special, as I hadn’t encountered anything like that before.
This butcher was significantly less aromatic, but it was clean and crisp. It’s probably the cleanest butcher I’ve been to in Mexico and they seem to have the hookup on high quality meat and bacon in Puerto Escondido. It’s so high quality, we’ve considered many ways to smuggle it and sell it to our community, especially the bacon.
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Mexico is like a wonderland that keeps me surprised. Just when I think I’m figuring it out, it surprises me in another pleasant way. Until this trip, we were under the impression that bacon just wasn’t that good here. Now we’ve been proven wrong and I’m very happy for it.
