Cactus paddles with mouth numbing peppercorns and masala spices

Norma and Saqib’s Grilled Sichuan Nopales

  • Norma and Saqib’s Grilled Sichuan Nopales
    My dream room -- the apartment above Masala y Maiz
  • Norma and Saqib’s Grilled Sichuan Nopales
    My contribution to the daily menu: Agave skin pouch with spiced tomatos, vegetables, and poached egg. Served w/fried garlic and peanut crunch
  • Norma and Saqib’s Grilled Sichuan Nopales
    Saqib preparing his famous masala fried chicken
  • Norma and Saqib’s Grilled Sichuan Nopales
    Julia and Norma, charring fresh veggies on the grill at Masala y Maiz
  • Norma and Saqib’s Grilled Sichuan Nopales
    Server uniforms at Masala y Maiz, designed by Carla Fernandez
  • Norma and Saqib’s Grilled Sichuan Nopales
    cactus paddles with Sichuan spice blend, ready for the grill
  • Norma and Saqib’s Grilled Sichuan Nopales
    Grilled cactus paddles, photo by Ana Lorenzana
  • Norma and Saqib’s Grilled Sichuan Nopales
    Menu and program by Macolen, the design and print shop located next to Masala y Maiz
  • Norma and Saqib’s Grilled Sichuan Nopales
    Guests enjoy the family style meal
  • Norma and Saqib’s Grilled Sichuan Nopales
    Grilled chilacayotes (Mexican squash), broccoli, and spring onions with papalo salsa verde
  • Norma and Saqib’s Grilled Sichuan Nopales
    Papalo salsa verde

NOTES

This is the best damn preparation of cactus paddles that I have ever tried. Normally prepared in a salad, sliced and boiled, the option to grill the nopales whole was a welcome change. They should be young, vibrantly earthy green, thin and fresh; when you break them they should snap with a crisp. Grilling them whole prevents the paddle from producing that gooey, mucilaginous texture, similar to okra. Instead, rubbed with spices and lightly charred, these were tender and green, and almost meaty. Make sure you buy whole, prepared paddles at your Mexican grocer. They will remove the prickly spines for you. The Sichuan peppercorn is slightly “numbing” to the tongue.

INSTRUCTIONS

First prepare the Masala:

In a skillet, toast the whole spices (cumin, coriander, Sichuan peppercorn, fennel seed, black peppercorns) together until aromatic, over low heat. Keep them moving in the pan. Be careful not to burn the spices — if it starts to smell acrid or burnt, start over with a new batch of spices. When toasted, remove the spices from heat and transfer them to a plate or pan to cool.

Add a little bit of oil to the pan and fry the dried chili until it becomes brittle. Remove the chili from heat and place on the paper towel or sheet of newspaper to cool.

Grind the spices in a clean spice grinder to a powder. Add in the chili and grind until the chili is incorporated into the powder (some larger chunks of chili skin will remain unincorporated). Add the amchoor, black salt and Asafetida and kosher salt to the ground spices and pulse the grinder 3 times to incorporate well.

Remove your masala from the spice grinder and pour into a ramekin for use. Whatever you don’t use immediately can be stored in the freezer in a airtight glass container for a couple weeks.

For the Nopales:

This recipe is best prepared on a charcoal grill, but can be adapted to use a oven in broiler setting (though it won’t be nearly as tasty). Prepare your coals and let them burn until they are white. It should be a medium high heat meaning that you can hold your hand over the coals for about 3 seconds before you have to pull it away.

Buy pre-cleaned, small to medium sized nopales. (You can also clean and de-thorn them yourself, using gloves and a vegetable peeler).

Rinse each nopal and pat very dry. Score each nopal lightly in a crosshatch pattern with a sharp pairing knife.

Brush a good quality olive oil on each side of the nopal, and liberally sprinkle the chaat masala over each paddle.

Brush the grill grate with vegetable oil.

Put the dressed nopales down on the hot grill and cook undisturbed for 4-5 minutes per side. As each side is grilling, squeeze some lime juice over top. You want clear grill marks to form and for the nopal to be tender throughout.

Remove from heat and sprinkle on more chaat masala or salt if necessary.

Serve hot off the grill and garnish with a dressed cilantro leaf salad on top.

RECIPE

DIFFICULTY

EASY

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SERVES

4

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PREP TIME

20 MINS

For the Masala

  • 2 
    tbsp 
    whole cumin seed
  • 1 
    tbsp 
    whole coriander seed
  • 2 
    tbsp 
    Sichuan peppercorn
  • 1 
    tbsp 
    black peppercorns
  • 1/2 
    tbsp 
    whole fennel seed
  • 1 
    tbsp 
    kosher salt
  • 3 
    tbsp 
    Amchoor (raw green mango) powder
  • 2 
    tbsp 
    powdered black salt
  • 1 
    tsp 
    Asafetida/Hing powder
  • 1 
     
    dried red Kashmiri Mirch (chili pepper) with the stem removed.

Numbing Chaat Nopales de Masala y Maiz

  • 4 
     
    medium young nopales, cleaned
  • 1/2 
    cup 
    Olive oil (good quality evoo)
  • 1/2 
    cup 
    Veg oil (for rubbing on the grill)

INSTRUCTIONS

First prepare the Masala:

In a skillet, toast the whole spices (cumin, coriander, Sichuan peppercorn, fennel seed, black peppercorns) together until aromatic, over low heat. Keep them moving in the pan. Be careful not to burn the spices — if it starts to smell acrid or burnt, start over with a new batch of spices. When toasted, remove the spices from heat and transfer them to a plate or pan to cool.

Add a little bit of oil to the pan and fry the dried chili until it becomes brittle. Remove the chili from heat and place on the paper towel or sheet of newspaper to cool.

Grind the spices in a clean spice grinder to a powder. Add in the chili and grind until the chili is incorporated into the powder (some larger chunks of chili skin will remain unincorporated). Add the amchoor, black salt and Asafetida and kosher salt to the ground spices and pulse the grinder 3 times to incorporate well.

Remove your masala from the spice grinder and pour into a ramekin for use. Whatever you don’t use immediately can be stored in the freezer in a airtight glass container for a couple weeks.

For the Nopales:

This recipe is best prepared on a charcoal grill, but can be adapted to use a oven in broiler setting (though it won’t be nearly as tasty). Prepare your coals and let them burn until they are white. It should be a medium high heat meaning that you can hold your hand over the coals for about 3 seconds before you have to pull it away.

Buy pre-cleaned, small to medium sized nopales. (You can also clean and de-thorn them yourself, using gloves and a vegetable peeler).

Rinse each nopal and pat very dry. Score each nopal lightly in a crosshatch pattern with a sharp pairing knife.

Brush a good quality olive oil on each side of the nopal, and liberally sprinkle the chaat masala over each paddle.

Brush the grill grate with vegetable oil.

Put the dressed nopales down on the hot grill and cook undisturbed for 4-5 minutes per side. As each side is grilling, squeeze some lime juice over top. You want clear grill marks to form and for the nopal to be tender throughout.

Remove from heat and sprinkle on more chaat masala or salt if necessary.

Serve hot off the grill and garnish with a dressed cilantro leaf salad on top.

This past winter, chefs Norma Listman and Saqib Keval, invited to me cook in Mexico City, and live in the perfectly appointed apartment perched above their restaurant, Masala y Maiz. I would be the second of their series of Chefs in Residence, a bi-monthly experiment in generosity and thoughtful cooking. For Norma and Saqib a restaurant is not just a business — it is a hub for education, research, and experimentation. Work and life partners, they met while living in Oakland. Saqib was establishing his project, Peoples’ Kitchen Collective, and Norma was cooking at the restaurant Camino. They were instantly bound by a profound conviction that food is more than a capitalist transaction. Rather, food has the unique potential to bring our most complex politics and history to light. Moving to Mexico to open a dream restaurant of their very own, Norma and Saqib were not about to start following the rules.

Located in the residential neighborhood of San Miguel Chapultapec, Masala y Maiz is made up of one narrow corridor whose footprint is 90% occupied by a long cement table. Half the space is open to the elements. The jovial staff wear oversized denim tunics designed by Mexico City designer, Carla Fernandez, with neon embroidered “power to the people” fists on each back. Guests don’t just eat here once — they come once a week (and that’s not including their stop on the way to work to grab a donut from the “donut window”). By the time I arrived, the restaurant had only been up and running for a few months. Their opening was waylaid by the recent earthquake, a disaster that moved Norma and Saqib to shift their focus temporarily to aid work. But by the time I arrived, in the middle of brunch service no less, it felt as if they had been a fixture in the neighborhood for decades. The expectations of a Masala y Maiz chef in residence are delightfully vague – put one dish on the menu, and host an event. In essence, this time is a gift.

As soon as I arrived and I took one husky whiff inside the pantry, my objectives materialized: I wanted to cook with Norma and Saqib, to maybe absorb just one teaspoon of their combined knowledge. Norma, having grown up just one hour north in Texacoco, knows every chile and heirloom corn variety in the seed bank (her father literally works for an NGO maiz seed bank). Saqib, raised in Sacramento by a Pakistanti-American family and trained to cook in France, brings a whole other lexicon to the kitchen – fermented chickpea batters, aromatic spice blends, and tangy pickle chutneys. The magic of their food, and their relationship, is that it blends together seamlessly, Saqib tossing masala into tortillas, and Norma pouring coconut milk into the esquites, like there never was another way to do it. It’s uplifting to cook in their kitchen. Despite the exhausting day-to-day realities of a new restaurant, Saqib dances as he fries chicken, and Norma shuts her eyes in attentive bliss every time she samples a salsa or an  experiment in fermentation. She pauses in thought before she declares, “de-lish-us!” Forget Noma — this was the stage I had been waiting for.

With my goal to spend as much time cooking with Norma and Saqib as possible, we decided to host a Sunday asado — a family style BBQ featuring a motherload of vegetables. Eager to showcase the fresh agave blossoms we harvested at Norma’s family home the weekend before, we dipped the green flowers in a masala-spiked batter, and fried them into pakora, alongside romaritos, a seasonal green with a succulent texture. We blitzed homemade mango pickle with lime and fish juice, to bath delicate slices of white-fleshed huachinango fish. Saqib went to town marinating chicken in yogurt and masala, frying it to a golden crisp, while I grilled chilacayotes, my new favorite summer squash. Macolen, the print and design shop next door, created a work of art for the program and menu cards, complete with a collage of a towering agave flower on the cover. Guests came ready to eat, and drink copious amounts of hibiscus mead.

Menu

  • Tiradito with maracuya and mango pickle leche de tigre
  • Masala Fried Chicken
  • Green salad with piloncillo chile vinaigrette and avocado
  • Grilled Chilacayotes, Broccoli and Spring Onions with papalo-almond salsa verde
  • Crispy Chickpea Flour Fried Agave Blossoms + Romaritos with lime aioli
  • Grilled numbing nopales
  • Fruit, homemade chamoy, seasoned salt, cacahuates Japonais, and lime

*Note: Due to an unfortunate run-in with corrupt government officials, Masala y Maiz is closed until further notice. Please follow them on Instagram, @masalaymaiz, to stay abreast of news of pop-ups and off-site events during the interim.