American diners gladly pay for high-end fungus like black truffles — so why are we sleeping on Mexico’s huitlacoche?
that included tomatoes, peppers, beans, squash, and, of course, maize — the sacred crop in Aztec mythology. But like most civilizations, the Aztecs came across unexpected challenges during their agricultural revolution, which required them to adapt. One of these discoveries was huitlacoche.
But outside of Mexico, particularly in the neighboring United States, huitlacoche is disappointingly rare — the general absence of huitlacoche on menus here suggests just how bad a rap this funky ingredient has. Its nicknames are an indicator of its troubled public image: Food bloggers often refer to it as the Mexican “truffle,” a Eurocentric attempt to normalize the Indigenous ingredient to unfamiliar audiences.
Certain cultural assumptions and other barriers have likely kept huitlacoche off U.S. grocery shelves. For example, merely searching the fungus on Google will churn out results labeling it as an “invasive” disease, a “blight” or an undesirable “infection,” rather than just a food item. Huitlacoche’s blue-grey-black appearance arguably does not appeal to the American eye. Paired with its classification as a fungus and its description as a “disease,” consumers might quickly assume it’s inedible.
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