I’ve been an admirer of the non-acoholic Mexican street drinking culture for some time now. Yeah you heard that right. There’s a whole world of cool, traditional, more savory bevvys they do with a large amount of it based off some variation or incorporation of chocolate, corn, tamarind, cinnamon, clove, vanilla, piloncillo (unrefined cane sugar), raisins, etc. All the good stuff. I’m a bit of a poser as I’ve never been down there, and haven’t experienced these drinks firsthand but from what I gather there’s vendors alongside the road in certain areas with all sorts of aqua frescas, horchata, champurrado (a hot chocolate thickened with corn) and of course atole.

Great corn is coming into season now. We’ve incorporated it into cocktails in the past to mixed results, mostly infusions. This year I’d like to do a really good one. Like a knock your socks off type, but I’m not sure what that will look like. Corn is the easiest thing to put into food, you can just add it blindly and it’ll nine times out of ten improve whatever you’re cooking. But with cocktails, unless it’s a spirit made with corn like bourbon, using corn can be a finicky process.

Enter atole. A warm corn beverage made with piloncillo, vanilla, and cinnamon. Sounds pretty good to me. The hardest part would be the warming up process during service and of course, as someone pointed out last night, it’s summertime…A warm drink isn’t exactly desirable when the air conditioning is barely functional and everyone in the dining room has swamp ass.

Online, traditional recipes point to using masa harina. This is nixtamalized corn meal used for a variety of dishes, drinks, etc. Corn kernals soaked in calcium hydroxide, ground into a paste and left to dry. When you need to make a real tortilla, you add some water and go, go, go!

So once you’ve got yourself some of this masa harina you can use it to make champurrado, atole, whatever else.

So let’s get to it already.

It was a moderately busy night last night so Angel and I got to messing around with corn. First off, we cut the kernels off the cobs, then juiced the kernels. This went into a pot for corn pudding. An easy procedure. You heat it up and whisk it and then it thickens naturally. This was the coolest part of the night because it’s so easy and makes you feel like you know what you’re doing.

We took the spent cobs and added 1 cup of water per cobb. 14 in all and put it on the burner to make corn stock. Neither of us knew what to expect here. I think we thought it would thicken up like the pudding. Nope. It just makes a corn flavored water, even when reduced down to 2 cups. Oh well. I’m sure it’ll have some use.

What we did do was take some of the spent cobs afterward and add a bunch of milk, piloncillo, cinnamon, and a vanilla bean and then throw this mess on a burner. A good idea at first, until the whole thing got hot and broke and turned into a disgusting looking brown bunch of bad chowder. I strained it off then whisked in some agar agar to re-emulsify it. This worked. The result was a tasty but thin brownish gruel. “It’s supposed to be that color,” Angel told me. Oh, ok. He’s the expert, I’m the tourist here. I added some cornstarch but forgot the face of my father and didn’t make a slurry (water, cornstarch) before adding it which gave it an undesirable chunkiness. Anyway, what a fucking mess. The saving grace is that we could just strain it and serve it and of course, the golden rule of screwing up so you learn better. We ended up going through a few iterations before sticking the landing.

The first shot here is a too large bowl. Upon Angel’s recommendation we whisked in some ancho infused rum and then topped it with some corn pudding and grated cinnamon. Yeah baby. Pretty damn good but not sweet enough.

Next up, this weird little crock thingy. Much better with grated piloncillo. Now we’re talking.

The final iteration went into a Kinto coffee mug. The only other tweak was a couple dashes of some shio koji for the pudding (a magical Koji Kid thing from last year). Looks pretty good, tastes even better. How this ends up on the menu is beyond me. Heating it to order might be a disaster on a busy night and it’d be too thick to drink cold. Maybe we’ll bust it out for choice regulars and that’ll be it. I do think it would make one hell of a punch though. Maybe even with corn pudding somehow added to it. I think it would be really cool as a frozen drink a la Miami Vice style.

Corn punch, ancho infused rum, mezcal, corn pudding as a whipped topper?

Corn is a truly remarkable ingredient. Think of all the products that come from it and all the ways we’re able to twist and turn it. Corn oil, tortilla chips, breakfast cereals, shit even faux plastic biodegradable cups to drink out of. Not bad for common grass.