"latin america" news and stories

For the next three days we're going to feature Latin American flavors, starting with the empanada, one of those perfect pop-in-your mouth treats. It's hard not to love the baked turnovers of flaky pastry dough stuffed with your choice of beef, spicy chicken, Argentine sausage, shrimp, spinach, broccoli, tuna... or pretty much any combination you can think of.

Stevendepolo shot the photo of this dark and meaty combo of ground beef, hard-cooked eggs and black olives at a party to celebrate Chilean Independence Day (which is September 18). But we say, start eating those empanadas now! Try this Kitchen Daily recipe for a spicy beef variety with pipián (pumpkin seeds).

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Piloncillo is an unrefined sugar that is commonly used in Mexican cooking. The sugar has been around for at least 500 years, and was being made before the Spanish came to Mexico around 1500. It is made when sugar canes are crushed, the juice is collected and boiled then poured into molds, where it hardens into blocks. The fact that it comes in block form is one of the reasons why white and brown sugars are more commonly used, even in Mexican cooking, than piloncillo once was. To use it, it must be grated or chiseled off the main block - a process which is well worth the resulting flavor boost in food to some, but too time consuming for others to bother.

Unlike white sugar, which is flat and one-dimensional in its sweet flavor, piloncillo is smoky, caramely and earthy. It has far more flavor than brown sugar, which is generally just white sugar with a small amount of molasses added back to it. It can be uses in moles and other sauces, as well as to simple sweeten coffee or top off buttery toast. In most applications, it must be melted down to be incorporated into recipes. You can find piloncillo in many Mexican or Latin American grocery stores or order it online.

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Today's Wall Street Journal featured a front-page article about the demand for Mexican-made Coca Cola in the U.S. Mexican Coke is made with cane sugar, unlike American Coke, which is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. While some soda aficionados like Mexican Coke for its supposedly cleaner taste and better mouth feel, its main market in the U.S. is to Mexican immigrants. While Coca Cola authorizes several bottlers to distribute its products in Mexico, the company is continually trying to stop the importation of those soft drinks into the U.S. for fear that they'll compete with the sodas bottled here. Since the bottles aren't actually counterfeit, they're still legal to import. The results are slightly covert networks of distributors that import Mexican Coke to the U.S. and then distribute it throughout the country. The WSJ traces a few bottles from Mexico to Georgia.