(pleasant music)
New York City.
On the street corners, and in the neighborhoods
of this epicenter of multiculturalism,
delicious aromas waft into the streets.
Tantalizing cuisines and flavors from around the world.
But there's one cuisine that is loved above all
in the good old US of A.
There are no less than 59,000 Mexican restaurants
strewn across the country,
and in a quiet corner of Brooklyn,
there is something special.
(flames crackling)
This is Claro.
The chef, T.J. Steele.
Claro is a Oaxacan-inspired restaurant.
We do kind of a modern New York take
on some Oaxacan classics.
A side of rice.
A blue corn tortilla.
A bevy of mushrooms.
Homemade chorizo.
Fresh made cheese.
A splash of spicy salsa.
I know what you're thinking.
Mm, tacos.
But this is not just a classic Mexican meal.
Every mouthful tells the story of human history.
Each of these ingredients,
the grains, meats, cheeses,
fruits and vegetables, reveals another chapter
in our shared story.
Together, they symbolize 12,000 years of innovation,
invention, selection, and serendipity
known as the agricultural revolution.
(dramatic music)
(soothing music)
For the vast majority of human existence,
we were nomads.
In pursuit of the next meal,
our ancient ancestors roamed the Earth,
seeking ample game and bountiful flora.
We harnessed the power of fire to cook our meals.
Then, for 100 centuries,
we endured and survived a global Ice Age.
So, how did we get from this frozen world
to taco Tuesday?
(wind whistling)
Charlotte Lusty is a member of the Global Crop Trust,
working in Svalbard to preserve
the last 12,000 years of agricultural history.
(gentle piano music) (birds chirping)
In the early years of agriculture,
there were people who were understanding
and learning how to cultivate wild plants,
and in doing that they cultivated plants
that were delicious to eat in sufficient amounts
that allowed them to develop cities and towns
and civilizations.
(pleasant music)
Whether you're talking in the Far East,
or Egyptian, Greek, Roman,
Aztec, Inca, they were all based on
brilliant farmers who were producing enough food
to allow society.
So it was a fundamental part of our evolution as humans
to become great farmers.
This Fertile Crescent of the Middle East
would come to be known as the cradle of civilization,
and is regarded as the birthplace of writing,
trade, math,
and organized religion.
And all of this springs from the advent of agriculture.
(pleasant music)
The success of farming meant we finally
had a reason to stop our perennial wanderings
and begin to settle down,
and try to make an honest species of ourselves.
As our society becomes totally dependent
on agriculture, that really does change the game.
Agriculture is a tremendous blessing
in the sense that it enables societies
to produce a lot more food,
and therefore to sustain a lot more population.
Where it had taken 5,000 acres
to support each member of a hunter gatherer community,
the same amount of land could feed
5,000 people in an agrarian society.
Agriculture provided us with a surplus
of grains, vegetables, and livestock.
And the population of the planet
went from five million people 10,000 years ago
to more than seven billion today.
Agriculture also makes possible
a wider range of specialized activities.
That's something you couldn't have had,
and you can't have in a pre-agrarian
or non-agrarian society.
People did not have to be
directly involved in producing food.
Instead, they could become craftsmen,
artists, religious leaders,
or chefs.
(pleasant music)
Cooking is something that
there was never really another choice for me.
It was the only thing I ever thought that I would do,
or wanted to do, and really enjoy doing.
(pleasant music)
I think it's hard to get authentic
regional Mexican food in New York.
Even in the states in general
I think people kind of clump
all of Mexico's greatest hits into one.
What we do here is a little different
because we focus on the region of Oaxaca,
which in itself has many different subregions
and lots of different kind of
cuisine that come together there.
(pleasant music)
I think one of the things that I found
when I went to Mexico was a lot more soul in the food.
I felt an emotional attachment to Mexican food.
I think that it spoke a lot more to
my soul and what I was feeling towards food.
I can take all of the
relationships, ideas, food experiences,
everything from my time in Oaxaca
and kind of just bring it here in New York
and kind of share it with everyone.
T.J.'s Oaxacan meal begins with a side of rice,
the staple accompaniment to many a Mexican meal.
The cuisines and civilizations of the world
were shaped most influentially
by the magical transformations of their native grasses.
(pleasant music)
One of the great kinds of food magic
is the transformation of grasses,
'cause that's really what we're talking about.
The great staples of the world wheat, maize, barley, rice.
All the other food sources that started as wild grasses
and which humans turned into edible food and drink
by cultivation,
by selecting, by breeding,
and have consumed now for thousands of years.
Our journey through agricultural history
begins in Asia, where one ingredient
has always dominated the cuisine, rice.
It is believed that humans have been selecting
and influencing rice evolution
since the Chinese first started cultivating it
around 7000 BCE.
Today, rice is the primary crop and staple
of more than half the world's population.
(rice burbling)
While rice is our side dish,
for many rice is at the heart of every meal.
(burner clicks)
I knew that was gonna happen.
(JJ laughs)
Hey what's up, I'm JJ Johnson,
and I love to cook rice.
If I had to define culture through food,
I would say culture is rice.
It's really at the center of the table,
regardless of where you go in the world.
Rice is the common ingredient,
and then you develop that flavor profile
how you want it to be,
based off who you are, where you're from in the world.
(upbeat music)
I'm all about the mother grains of the world.
There's all these rices that fuel the world
that have all these amazing stories to it
that everybody forgot about.
(oil sizzling)
Despite its enduring popularity,
today rice is nowhere near as varied as it once was.
Most supermarkets are limited to white rice,
brown rice, long grain,
short grain, jasmine,
and that's about it.
But rice is infinitely more diverse than that.
We have over 100,000 distinct varieties of rice.
That would be the highest diversity
of any of the plant kingdom.
And almost no one gets to experience it.
If you're into flavor, like I am,
the more diversity the better.
(pleasant music)
Glenn Roberts is the founder of Anson Mills,
a company dedicated to the cultivation and preservation
of grains and seeds from bygone eras.
From the black tribute rice
used to pay taxes to Chinese emperors,
all the way to the grandfather
of long rice in the Americas, Carolina Gold.
(pleasant music)
We are first and foremost rice people.
What I have here, this is a ton of Carolina Gold rice seed,
and this is our production rice
and our main thing that we do.
Bottom line is extraordinary rice.
One of the most beautiful foods you can imagine.
(soothing music)
We have lots of different rices.
We only grow heirloom grains.
All of our plants are from eras
all the way back to the dawn of civilization.
One of the grains we work with
is 22,000 years old supposedly on carbon dating.
Those foods are spectacular,
and part of what we've been doing
is trying to bring them back.
It's hard work and it's really exacting work,
but it's also very very rewarding.
Glenn has spent the last two decades
working with scientists to bring heirloom
and ancient grains back to our dinner tables.
There's a big cognition now in modern times
of the fact that heirlooms are important,
because in old crops, landrace and heirloom crops,
flavor equals nutrition.
So you're looking for the highest flavor.
(pleasant music)
This might not even fit in here.
Rice is everything.
It is truly what I feel
is the most casual common ingredient in the world,
and I think since it's so casual,
we all forget
that it really fuels our soul.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter
if you're a king or a president,
a maid, a chef,
rice is just something that we all know.
This beautifully engineered grain of grass
remains the staple of dinners around the world.
Onto the main course.
Today we're going to be cooking
some memelas on the comal.
The base of our historic meal, the tortilla,
is made of another grass,
which has towered in importance
throughout Central American history.
Maize, or corn.
One of the first things that I noticed
getting to Oaxaca was the quality of the corn,
and the masa.
Even just a tortilla is like super satisfying.
It's kind of how people would talk about
like a great French baguette or a croissant or something.
You're like wow, if you haven't had that corn before
I don't know that you've ever had
the proper experience with a tortilla.
(soothing music)
Maize was the foundation
of the great empires of Central America.
Including the Aztecs of Mexico
and the Inca of Peru.
The oldest remains left from a meal of maize
were found in the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico.
The tiny ears had been gnawed on
over 5,000 years ago.
When farmers took wild plants
and developed things that
they could eat in large quantities,
they had to leave behind certain aspects
of the wild species that weren't so helpful.
So they had to keep selecting plants
until they had what was useful to them.
It's a similar thing that's happened
in human evolution,
because human diversity is not very great.
And what is absolutely astounding
is there's probably more genetic diversity
in a field of traditional maize varieties
than there is in the entire human race.
(soothing music)
Maize is derived from a grass called teosinte,
which is indigenous to Central Mexico.
The difference between teosinte
and modern maize is remarkable.
With human help, this humble plant evolved,
as bigger ears with fatter kernels
were selected and planted.
And corn, or maize, has never waned
in its importance to Central America.
(gentle piano music)
(speaks foreign language)
To the civilizations of Central America,
maize was both the source of life,
and the reason for living.
It was food, economy, nutrition,
and flavor all in one.
The Mayans didn't just subsist on maize,
they came from maize.
(intense music)
The Aztecs and their gods exchanged
their most precious possessions.
Human hearts for the heart of corn.
(thunder booms)
The basic rule I think is very easily understood.
The food which feeds humanity,
so that becomes your god.
That's the food that you have to acknowledge
that you are very grateful to.
(bells toll)
(speaks foreign language)
(gentle piano music)
Since corn in Oaxaca has always been
such a staple part of the diet and the culture here,
there might be a little bit more respect for it.
(gentle piano music)
Haven't been able to find any corn in the states
that comes close to anything
that's going on down here in Mexico
as far as flavor and starch content, and even aroma.
Everything that we're looking for at the restaurant
is in the corn that we find down here.
(pleasant music)
The ancient practice of soaking
and boiling corn with white lime,
releases amino acids and vitamin B,
and makes it easier to grind.
(speaks foreign language)
This difficult process is necessary
in the quest for the building block
of every great Mexican meal, masa.
And from masa, the tortilla.
(speaks foreign language)
T.J. is making a thick and hearty memela.
But for the common taco, the tortilla is king.
And in a year, the average Mexican
consumes around 185 pounds of them.
(flames crackling) (soothing music)
The difference between something you would buy at a store
and something that we're making here
with no preservatives or additives to it is huge,
like you can smell the difference,
feel it, taste it,
everything across the board.
It can be fried, it can be cooked dry on a comal,
it can be finished on a grill.
You can see it in all different shapes
from tortillas, tlayudas, memelas, all kinds of things.
The possibilities are endless.
Masa is life.
Thanks to millennia of progress,
we now have a steaming side of rice,
and a blue corn memela.
(pleasant music)
Staple food sources rich in carbohydrates
and vitamins changed the game.
But the grass wasn't necessarily greener at first.
When ancient people diverged from their
hunter gatherer diets, and became dependent
on a stable diet of great grasses,
they began to pay a devastating biological price.
(intense music)
There's no progress without a kickback from fate.
I mean that's life.
And in the case of agriculture,
in every early case of a society
made them dependent on a single staple
or a very limited range of staples.
They were more rickety, they were shorter,
they were feebler than their Paleolithic predecessors
who had relied on wild food.
The fossil record reveals
that humans' nutritional health declined
as a direct result of this homogenized diet.
Eating only grains every day gave early farmers
cavities and periodontal disease,
conditions rarely found in hunter gatherers.
Despite their challenges,
people didn't want to give up their new lifestyle.
The diets of early farm dwellers diversified
as the art of cultivation and domestication was honed.
Grains were not agriculture's only gift.
As we settled, hunters became herders.
(intense music)
Herd animals like cows, goats, sheep,
pigs, horses, and camels
provided easy access to protein through meat.
Not only are people using these animals for food,
they're creating new species
by selecting from the wild varieties,
keeping them together in one place,
breeding from them,
producing every bigger specimens
for more food, more nutritional value,
and that's what changes the pattern of evolution.
(pleasant music)
Humans are beginning to produce species
that would not have existed,
and could not survive without human intervention.
(cattle mooing)
Cattle were first domesticated
in the early Neolithic Period simultaneously
in both the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe.
Wild chickens, indigenous to India and East Asia,
were domesticated around 7,000 years ago.
(rooster crows)
And pigs descended from the Eurasian wild boar.
Domestication led to culinary experimentation,
allowing our love of meat
to take on new forms and flavors.
(singing in foreign language)
(Latin music)
Grilled meat's really popular in Oaxaca.
You'll see traveling through the markets and stuff,
there'll be a lot of little stands set up
that might be a little old lady on the corner
grilling up some meat and putting it on top of tortillas.
You'll see a lot of stews or tacos de cazuela.
These like beautiful earthenware pots
that are full of stews and kind of pick what you want
and they'll fill tortillas with it.
(speaks foreign language)
Right now we're looking at chorizo, Oaxacan style.
This chorizo has tons of flavor.
T.J. takes inspiration
from the markets of Oaxaca
and brings it to the tables of Brooklyn.
Using better quality meats here
has yielded us a product that reminds me more
of food in Oaxaca because I think
that they're all one step closer to the farm.
So here I'm stirring up our housemade chorizo.
And basically it's heritage pork meat,
which is like an heirloom pork meat
that we grind in house,
and then we're adding in guajillos from Mexico,
which is when it gets all of its nice red color from,
and then for spices it's getting Mexican oregano,
thyme, allspice, a little bit of cumin,
some white vinegar, a little sugar and salt,
and that's it.
(flames crackling) (pleasant music)
This spicy Mexican favorite
will be the centerpiece of T.J.'s memela.
But there are more stories to be told by this dish.
As a species, our love affair with cheese
predates recorded human history.
Now we're gonna add a little bit of farm cheese
that we make in house.
Basically it's a fresh cheese,
almost like a ricotta style cheese,
and this is also something that's
very typical to Mexico or Oaxaca.
Cheese is thought to have originated
when milk curdled while being transported in bladders
made of the ruminant stomachs of cattle.
It was love at first bite.
Introduced to Europe by travelers from Asia,
and to the New World by the pilgrim settlers,
today cheeses from around the world
differ wildly in their preparation and flavor.
(pleasant music)
It comes aged,
stinky,
creamy,
soft,
hard,
and moldy.
We make all of our own cheese in house.
I think that you can taste the difference.
You can taste the love and the care in it,
and it really shows.
This is a chorizo memela with some asiento bean paste,
and then a housemade chorizo and potato
with some fresh cheese on top and cilantro.
Our first dish is up,
but this Oaxacan feast isn't done yet.
(pleasant music)
As tasty as they are, we cannot survive
on meats and cheeses alone.
(pleasant music)
There's a reason your parents always told you
to eat your vegetables.
Not only are they delicious,
they're the cornerstone of nutrition.
From apples to mangoes,
onions to avocados,
peppers to chiles,
cultivation of regional fruits and veggies
was essential to culinary culture.
Going to Oaxaca and seeing the food down there,
it kind of blew my mind how much flavor
you can get out of something like a mushroom.
These flavors can take you back to the earth.
For the veggie lovers,
T.J. is preparing his famous mushroom and pea shoot memela.
I think mushrooms are fun
because they kind of have the meatiness
without having meat in them.
These are all wild mushrooms that are in season.
I like these mushrooms too,
because they all have a different texture and color.
Pink oyster, the blue foot.
Some of the cauliflower, my pioppinis.
(T.J. whistles)
(pleasant music)
And, it wouldn't be complete
with the spicy crowning glory, salsa.
All these different vegetables
come together as one.
It's always a balance of sweet, salty, savory, acidic.
Really can bring a dish together.
Though salsa is a seemingly simple condiment,
this mix of veggies, fruits, and spices
actually dates back through the ages
of the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans.
(dramatic music)
Aztec lords combined tomatoes with chile,
ground squash seeds, and legumes.
And the Spaniards first encountered salsa
in the 15th Century.
(dramatic music)
First on the shopping list for our salsa, tomatoes.
This is a Zapotec tomato.
The first time I ever had this tomato was in Oaxaca
and I thought that it was just a weird looking
little funky tomato,
but just like we have heirloom tomatoes back home,
this is basically what that is here.
This species of the fruit family
originated here, in Central America.
Tomatoes were first exported in the 1500s.
These colorful fruits were introduced
across the continent of Europe, and notably Italy.
It's hard to imagine Italian food without tomatoes,
but they didn't become a staple of the cuisine
until around 1880, with the invention
of the margherita pizza in Naples.
This heirloom tomato will be the base.
The next ingredient for our salsa, onions.
These are knob onions.
In the states we call 'em spring onions,
but basically it's an onion
before it develops its harder skin on the outside,
so it's much sweeter and has a lighter flavor I guess,
and they're really good to cook on the grill
and serve on the side of some tacos,
or I like to just kind of much them
on their own once they're grilled.
They're really awesome.
(pleasant music)
Onions are rich in vitamin C,
mineral salts, and antioxidants.
Their beneficial effects were understood
as early as the building of the Pyramids.
Egyptian mummies were even accompanied
into the afterlife with stocks of onions
wrapped in bandages.
(Spanish guitar music)
Most of the work is done,
but a good Oaxacan salsa needs
one last very important thing.
A kick.
This stand is pretty cool.
It's a lot of different herbs and spices
and a lot that you would see in traditional Oaxacan food.
Some dry oregano and some cumin
and allspice is also.
A stall like this is really cool
'cause you can really smell all the spices and stuff,
and I don't know kind of takes you back in time
if you want to think about
a spice trader or something like that.
Piles of cool ingredients, it's awesome.
(Spanish guitar music)
Kind of making a freestyle salsa today,
and just taking some ingredients I like
and mixing 'em together.
One of the things I really enjoy coming down here
is like how these tomatoes are always super sweet
and ripe and super amazing.
And I think it's one of the things
that makes all the salsas and things here really special.
I just want a little bit more char on 'em
and then also as you see how they're bubbling here,
and kind of shrinking up,
what's happening is the water is cooking out
and that's intensifying the flavors.
Almost like a sun dried tomato would be.
And I'm basically gonna mash up the tomatoes
with a little bit of this chili paste
which is made from Oaxacan pasilla chile
which is a nice smoky chile kind of like a chipotle.
So it's gonna add a little bit of acid
from the tomatillo and some
smokiness and heat from the chile.
I think this might be done.
Yeah I'm just gonna add a little salt to this
and that's kind of perfect.
(gentle guitar music)
In every little bite,
T.J. tells a great, big story.
It took 12,000 years,
but our meal is finally complete.
(dramatic music)
Okay.
Let's eat.
Each taco represents the story
of agricultural selection, invention,
experimentation, and hard work.
(speaks foreign language)
(dramatic music)
From antiquity to modern day,
humans have bent the environment to our will,
and overseen the evolution and domestication
of plants and animals.
It was the ingredients provided by agriculture
that inspired appreciation of flavors.
But what good was producing a surplus of food
if it couldn't all be consumed or traded?
We needed to preserve, or die.
And agrarian life taught us another valuable lesson,
the alchemy of fermentation and food preservation.
Methods that fueled an age of exploration
that would change the world forever.
(dramatic music)
(pleasant music)