Baja California cuisine

What is the language of Baja California cooking? What alphabet does it have? What do you intend to communicate? Who is talking about it? What do your senses communicate? Baja California cuisine encompasses diverse migrations and cultures, languages, and traditions—it appears isolated and closed off from others, as if its coasts, mountains, valleys, cliffs, and coves had wanted to separate lives from the human beings who have crossed over here.

Smoked, salted and marinated are still present in the main products and dishes offered in this region as a first language, a primitive language that still allows us to know the distant letters and emotions when tasting—in many restaurants in Baja California, mainly in San Quintin and Bahía de los Ángeles—grilled oysters fresh out of the sea.

Missionaries introduced to the peninsula the cultivation of corn, wheat, grapes, sugar cane, olive trees, figs, peaches, pomegranates and dates; in addition to raising cattle, donkeys, horses and goats. Ranchers in the region exchanged or sold hides, salt, cheese, dried meat, fat, butter, figs, raisins, olives, cowhides, wines and other products that were produced for other items that arrived on ships such as cottons, linens, wools, silks, groceries, haberdashery and ironmongery

However, this implied the danger of extinction of indigenous knowledge and it's food. The Kiliwa people still remember cañas de quiotes asadas (roasted agave stalks), atole de bellotas amargas (bitter atole acorn drink), pozol de trigo (wheat pozol), atole de maíz con frijol (corn atole with beans), la sopa de chícharo con hueso (pea soup with bone), cacomites (wild tubers) cooked in a pit, guisado de biznaga (barrel cactus stew), bean silvestre con costilla and bun stew.

In the second half of the 19th century, groups of migrants began to settle on the Baja California peninsula, bringing with them their culinary techniques. For example, Japanese colonies established the fishing industry in Ensenada and still to date fish and shellfish from these waters are sold to Japan's global auction market.

Likewise, Chinese migrants established a new Chinese cuisine of sour and spicy flavors in Mexicali, a city they founded. In addition, from that historical period we inherited dishes like lobster cooked with butter and garlic and served with beans, rice and huge flour tortillas.

They also emphasize the abalone chorizo, smoked clam broth, crab legs with paprika; potato broth with abalone, crab or machaca (shredded meat) burritos, drunken clam with vegetables, ranchero squid, bluefin tuna carpaccio, octopus ceviches and various types of fish; shrimp, clam and oyster cocktails; tostadas de erizo (toasted urchin tortilla) and patés, clam and snail pickles; sardines with tomato salsas, loggerhead broths and smoked fish and seafood tacos.

The first gastronomic movement in Baja California in the twentieth century was known as "continental cuisine" and originated on the border during the years of the enactment of the <i>Dry Law</i> (the amendment that banned the sale of alcohol in the United States from 1920 to 1933), mainly on avenida Revolución, where a range of international restaurants and cafés were installed. 

The maximum symbol of this "continental cuisine", a menu that mainly offered Italian and French food, is curiously the Caesar’s salad.

This dish, although it seems simple, explains all this movement: its ingredients are foreign or are not produced in the region, but here in Baja California they got together.

At that time, Tijuana mixed the best of international cuisine. Graciela Sández de Gutiérrez in the book History of Tijuana. 1889–1989 states that the chefs established in the region worked with more than 100 species of fish, seafood and hunting animals. Their mixtures were sophisticated and used salsas containing wines, cognacs and armagnacs. Their dishes were extravagant, "the last expression of the ancient times of the Renaissance, transplanted to Tijuana".

Despite the lack of water in most of the region and its mainly arid zones, the biodiversity and climate were an important factor in the development of a range of products (grapes for wine, cheeses, olives and vegetables; fish and shellfish that are only in the seas of the peninsula) and with them will lay the foundations of another culinary movement that began around 2003 and that was first known as Baja Med cuisine.

This new Mediterranean-style cuisine, made up of a group of chefs from the region, for the first time tried to communicate with all the cultures that preceded it and revalued products from the sky, sea and land of producers in Baja California. This created a style of its own based on local flavors and colors.