Mexican Mulitas

We have, frankly, an embarrassment of riches when it comes to Mexican food in the Chicago area. There are of course cities in the US with better and broader Mexican options. There’s Los Angeles, of course, undisputed as the top spot for Mexican street food in the US–as my friend Titus has claimed repeatedly, “LA is bar none the best city for tacos in the States.” There are also cities with food scenes that seem to have bled across the nearby border–San Diego, Tucson, El Paso, half the towns in Texas.

But for a city as far north as Chicago, as physically remote from the influence of Mexico as we are, there is a large and vibrant Mexican community in the city. Something like 20% of the residents of Chicago can claim some Mexican heritage, and you can find Mexican food everywhere, from the tamale stands dotting side streets across the city to the Supermercado Taquerias in every neighborhood to the birrierias across the south and west sides to the upscale eateries and Marisquerias in River North and Lincoln Square and Pilsen and wherever else people have appetites and money to spend.

Tijuana-style street food as represented by Tacos El Rey in Chicago’s Eastside neighborhood was a new one to me–but of course, the aforementioned Titus is Johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to new restaurants and first wrote about it nearly 3 years ago. He highlights their Tijuana-style (as filtered through LA) tacos, topped with avocado salsa and wrapped up in paper, and they look delicious. I’m there to take a look at another Tijuana-style street food: the Mulita.

As Titus discussed in the link above, El Rey serves Tijuana-style tacos, which come wrapped uniquely in paper, almost in a cone shape, and are generally served with an avocado salsa. All of their tacos have the option of being made with hand-made tortillas for a small upcharge–I’m not sure why anyone would choose otherwise, as good, freshly made tortillas are worlds apart from any that come wrapped in plastic. These handmade tortillas are not the best I’ve had–Birrieria Zaragoza’s are, by a mile–but they’re good. Tacos El Rey also has an item on the menu called “Vampiros,” which is a Tijuana-style taco with cheese melted onto the tortilla’s surface before it’s assembled. They are delicious and ever so slightly indulgent.

The mulita was like that–but even more so. Cheese melted to the insides of both tortillas, stuffed with a filling–we chose the “Mar y Tierra,” or Surf and Turf version, with steak and well-seasoned, nicely grilled shrimp, the Tijuana style avocado salsa, onions and cilantro.

El Rey’s bistec was rich, with a mineral, almost organ-like flavor to its chewy bits of well-seasoned steak but the real star here was the shrimp–and I’m not often a fan of shrimp. These massive shellfish were coated with a red spice blend and cooked just long enough, tender and firm and still juicy.

Homemade Mulitas

But before I found the local spot making them, I first found a number of recipes online promising authentic mulitas. Many of those recipes stress the importance, as did Tacos El Rey’s menu, of using handmade tortillas for the proper mulitas experience. So I started there.

The recipes I found most commonly referenced carne asada or carnitas as mulita fillings. I like both. I made both. They also seem to universally require a simple Tijuana-style guacamole with onions and cilantro, and one recipe recommended using a sauteed mixture of onions and chilies much like you’d find in a fajita, and I liked the sound of that too.

In assembling these, I used what I thought was the most sensible method of assembly, layering guac, onions and peppers, meats, salsa, and cheese. Based on what I saw at Tacos El Rey, it may make more sense to melt the cheese directly to the tortillas before assembling. That may make it more difficult to spread the guacamole evenly the way I was able to do directly on the tortilla, but this guacamole is less thick than most, and could conceivably be just dabbed by the spoonful into the mulita.

In any case, after assembling, I griddled each mulita, flipping from side to side to heat them evenly until the cheese melted.

The steak that Mindy and I make–marinated flank steak or skirt steak generally, browned quickly on a smoking hot cast iron skillet, rested for a few minutes, and then chopped into bite-sized pieces–is different than most taqueria carne asada or bistec that we get, which has usually spent some time sitting in a bain marie staying warm atop the griddle before being quickly reheated and stuffed into a tortilla. And I say this as a person who genuinely loves taqueria steak tacos. Ours is steak as steak, still pink inside, dripping with juice that mixes with guacamole and salsa roja to make a new sauce of its own.

I haven’t quite mastered the art of the handmade corn tortilla–mine are fine, and I’d rather eat them than a reheated tortilla from a plastic package most days. But they don’t have the warm soft pliability of the best corn tortillas I’ve had.

Still, it’s hard to beat juicy steak, melted Oaxacan cheese, sweet and spicy onions and peppers, and a tart, rich, pungent guacamole topped with a hot homemade salsa of ancho, guajillo, piquine, and arbol chilies, regardless of the quality of the tortillas. Those don’t quite crisp up on the griddle, but they do brown and become a bit more firm, enough to make it possible to pick up a mulita and eat it out of hand.

The carnitas mulitas were, if anything, better yet, and for more reasons than how fun it is to say “carnitas mulitas.” Carnitas are essentially a pork confit, featuring chunks of dry-brined pork butt roast slow-cooked in lard with spices and citrus and condensed milk and Mexican coke until all the seasonings disintegrate and the pork shreds at one’s touch. It’s crisp on the edges but tender within, fatty and salty and full of flavor.

In place of the lime-and-garlic marinated beef, with its assertive flavor and texture that stands out in any crowd, here we have shredded strands of pork–pork that has been slow cooked in more pork until it is almost the very essence of porkiness, but highlighted with flavors of cumin and clove and cinnamon, orange and oregano. It marries well with the other flavors and textures while still being undeniably the star of the sandwich.

Though with tacos I am 100% in the corn tortilla camp, I have found in the past that for this type of dish, featuring melted cheese between layers of tortilla, perhaps with some meat and other fillings in the mix–it might be called a Quesadilla or a Mulita or a Gringa–I prefer the folded-over flour tortilla to the stacked corn tortillas. But using fresh handmade tortillas might just change my mind on that score. I will keep an eye out for mulitas on Mexican menus going forward–Tijuana might just be on to something here!