Sept. 21--Five years ago, I wrote about carne en su jugo, an obscure soup with a Chicago presence largely centered around the Archer Heights neighborhood on the Southwest Side.
The reason for bringing it up again? Well, firstly, it's essentially steak-bacon soup, so come on.
Secondly, while I tried to bring some attention to this wondrous Jaliscan soup, I'm only flattering myself to think I could introduce the dish to the mainstream.
But you know who might? There's this up-and-comer you should keep an eye on. Rick Bayless is his name. Promising talent, knows his Mexican food.
While at Wicker Park's Xoco Bistro last weekend, I discovered that carne en su jugo ($19.75) is now featured on the dinner menu. Only here, the soup gets downplayed, and flank steak -- bearing the whiff of the wood grill -- becomes the centerpiece, laid lengthwise atop a beef broth with bacon, pinto beans, tomatillo for acid, and creamy hunks of avocados. (For the record, some wouldn't categorize it as a soup, as the proportions of liquid-to-protein make it more meat wading in broth.)
Before it landed on Xoco Bistro's dinner menu seven months ago, the dish began as a Thursday lunch special at Frontera Grill, Bayless said.
"I don't think of the dish as a soup, more of a really brothy beef dish," he explained. "It's hands down the most popular lunch special we've ever ran."
The dish is modeled after the one at Karne Garibaldi, the carne en su jugo specialists in Guadalajara once listed in the "Guinness Book of World Records" as the "fastest restaurant in the world." (The soup comes 15 seconds after you order it.)
Meanwhile, on the Southwest Side, you can still find classic examples of carne en su jugo. These are the places I visit anytime I have a flight to catch at Midway:
Originally published Sept. 23, 2010:
Repeat after me, por favor: carne en su jugo (pronounced "hoo-go"). Now isn't there something ethnically satisfying about those words sliding off the tongue? Doesn't saying it with strategically hardened consonants make one sound worldly, or worthy of a B+ in freshman Spanish?
The first time I said it aloud, it was a sexy, exotic phrase with no context. My remedial language skills knew it translated to "meat in its juices," which just made things more vague. Further research revealed carne en su jugo to be a soup that's near perfect, a 95/100 on most days that bumps up to a 97/100 when temperatures dip below freezing.
The soup is a mystery even to many Mexicans. Indigenous to the city of Guadalajara, carne en su jugo is a proud identity of the Jaliscan people, as noble a culinary tradition as chili in Texas. And like chili, beef and beans are the common denominators, but similarities end there.
On the Southwest Side of our fair city, I came upon a fine carne en su jugo at Las Cazuelas in the Archer Heights neighborhood. What Joe Red-Blooded American wouldn't be won over by a soup built on steak, bacon and beans? The broth approached consomme-quality, a stock so thin and ethereal it belied the intense beef essence with every spoonful. The soup ($8) had a tinge of lime and also leaned salty, which in my primordial brain lit up the lobe that recognizes deliciousness.
The dish is as sophisticated as you make it to be. On a base level, it's soup with bits of chopped beef and crispy bacon. Or admire the soup for its complexity: the smoky, robust broth, the color aesthetics, its one-spoon-many-textures from crunchy radish slices to buttery avocado to toothsome steak. The accompanying griddled corn tortillas had crispy bits of meat attached, surely residue from a previous order on the flattop, but proof that the flavors of many meals were imparted on each tortilla.
It was a remarkable bowl of soup. But that's just me. I'm a casual fan, not a scholar like Rob Lopata, whose expertise on carne en su jugo is without peer.
Lopata, 50, is an ex-futures trader with an impeccable gastronome's sense. He's the type to travel across time zones for a bowl of soup. In researching our city's tie to carne en su jugo, Lopata spent 18 months dining at the kind of Mexican restaurants whose typical clientele look little like him. He published his yeoman's work in a 4,000-word treatise on the culinary message board LTH Forum. That post, published four years ago, was the first time I heard about the dish.
A few key points from Lopata's findings: Most versions he sampled were salt bombs, likely the result of shortcuts taken, such as using bouillon cubes. The Old World tradition of making stock with a cattle's head doesn't exist in Chicago, and the technique is falling out of favor in Mexico.
The greater surprise was that few North Side restaurants served carne en su jugo. Lopata lived in Lakeview for 13 years, and he found maybe five places north of Madison Street (in Hispanic enclaves) that occasionally made the soup. Draw a circle with a 10-mile radius around Midway Airport, and you might find 100. Which is to say, Lincoln Parkers know little, if anything, about it.
We lamented this one day while dining at Birrieria de la Torre at 67th Street and Pulaski Avenue. For casual gourmands, the words "Mexican" and "soup" conjure three varieties: menudo, pozole, tortilla soup. And when carne en su jugo is on, it blows the others out of the water.
"This is a real workhorse dish for the Jaliscan culture. It's peasant food," Lopata said. "This is something that's culminated after many years, from a culture that's been unadulterated," he said, looking at the bowl before him. "Carne en su jugo is one of the great ones."
The matriarch at Birrieria de la Torre is Maria de la Torre, who has run her restaurant in the West Lawn neighborhood for six years. Carne en su jugo is the restaurant's second most popular dish behind its namesake birria (goat). In winters, customers pay $37 to buy the soup by the gallon.
"When we started the business, a lot of Mexicans were like, 'What is that?' " said daughter Iris, a native Jaliscan. "You don't find carne en su jugo in Mexico City. Now, people order it and we don't have to explain."
Iris described how the soup ($8.50) was an all-inclusive everyday meal. Americans tend to eat with separate plates -- salads, soups, main courses. "But for our kind of food," Iris said, "we get a big plate or bowl and eat it until we're full."
So much of soup is macerating ingredients into a slurry of uniform slurps. Unlike, say, chili, you can't mask faulty cooking here by adding extra tomato paste or hot sauce. To see the integrity of ingredients intact here -- whole Great Northern beans, radish coins with seamless pink rims, bulbs of blackened-grilled scallions -- shows a humbleness and respect for the recipe you can taste. Decades of trial and error have permitted this soup to evolve into the Darwinian ideal of perfection -- it'd be hard to improve upon it, and when it's good, it reaches spectacular heights.
We crumbled dried chile de arbol into our bowls and dug in. As with most ethnic dishes, it was fundamental and satisfying, food without pretense. The spoon sank down and emerged with charred slices of beef neck and shoulder meat, like taking a big bite of carne asada steeping in all its beefy righteousness. Then there was the bacon, which we needn't remind you is bacon and requires no further description beyond the words: bacon soup.
"Right now," Lopata said, "this is my favorite bowl of carne en su jugo in the city."
Smart folks would take his words as gospel.
Las Cazuelas, 4720 S. Pulaski Ave., 773-254-5770
Birrieria de la Torre, 6724 S. Pulaski Ave., 773-767-6075
Taqueria Los Gallos, 4211 W. 26th St., 773-762-7452; 6222 S. Archer Ave., 773-585-8835; 4252 S. Archer Ave., 773-254-2081
kpang@tribpub.com
Twitter @pang
