When Hugo Martinez first moved from Mexico to the U.S. in 2018 to attend Stanford Business School, every party he attended with his American classmates was stocked with beer, wine, and sometimes spirits. By the time he graduated in 2020, there had been a shift—the beverage selection at student shindigs were now dominated by Ready-to-Drink (RTD) sips. Yet, none of the flavors in the cooler, from the White Claws to the Truly hard seltzers, appealed to his palate. In a sea of strawberry, cherry, and kiwi options—none of which really tasted prominently like the advertised fruits—Martinez missed the vibrant, refreshing, boldly fruit-forward drink flavors he grew up with in Mexico City, like tart limonada, tangy tamarindo, and sweet, floral mango.

Though many of his American peers seemed to enjoy the RTD beverages, “I didn’t see the Latinos, and Hispanics, and me and my Mexican friends get into them as much,” he recalls. Martinez suspected this was because they were accustomed to totally different flavors, many of which are arguably bolder and more distinct than what they were encountering in the ice box.

In his native Mexico, there’s a broad category of delicious drink flavors that go well beyond the handful of bog-standard fruit flavorings that make up the RTD aisle in U.S. grocers. A lightbulb went off in Martinez’s entrepreneurial brain—perhaps there was an opportunity to introduce American imbibers to beloved Mexican ingredients through RTD beverages. So, he developed one, a spiked agua fresca called Picadas. Fermented in small batches, the canned drinks are reminiscent of the non-alcoholic varieties one might find on a traditional Mexican taqueria counter. The flavors represent nostalgic ingredients from Martinez’s youth—the distinctly tropical-tasting guayaba (guava); a sweet and sour limonada helada (made with Key limes rather than lemons); and mango, featuring a much sweeter variety of the fruit than the mangoes typically available in the U.S.   

Picadas is just one of a spate of all-natural Mexican beverages now sweeping the drinks industry in the U.S.—with an emphasis on traditional Latin American flavors. Rafael Martin Del Campo, co-founder of the Los Angeles-based tepache brand De La Calle, was born and raised in Mexico City. He’s the third generation in his family to brew tepache, a naturally fermented probiotic drink made from pineapples that’s popular among homebrewers throughout his native country. De La Calle is already available in grocery stores nationwide, and Martin Del Campo says there’s been interest from both customers and stores in exporting the product to not only Mexico, but South American and European countries, too. 

In Picadas’ case, Martinez and his team distributed their product solely in Mexico for an entire year before launching in Texas, the brand’s first U.S. market. But these beverages have broad appeal and Del Campo says both Hispanic and non-Hispanic populations have embraced his company’s products. As Martinez puts it, Picadas is “made by Mexicans for Mexicans for the world to enjoy. Not just the Mexican consumers.”

Mexican Americans make up 20% of the current U.S. population. That demographic is only growing—and businesses are increasingly trying to cater to the community, says Martinez. He points to the success of brands like Topo Chico, Jarritos, Corona, Modelo, and Takis, all of which have introduced Mexican products to the U.S. market, and explains that, “brands are starting to realize that there’s a huge market that they’re not paying attention to, that needs a different solution or a different product than what’s available.”

Brands like De La Calle may also be riding the zero-proof wave, but these culturally relevant libations aren’t just capitalizing on a trend—Mexican households have been making and drinking flavorful non-alcoholic concoctions for generations. Now, the U.S. market is catching up.

Even established food brands are moving into sips, in an effort to share the familiar flavors of their heritage to a new audience in drink form. Longtime Bronx-based tortilla purveyor Buena Vista recently launched Soda Mexicana, a less-sweet alternative to Jarritos, in pineapple, mandarin, apple, tamarind, and hibiscus flavors, all made with natural cane sugar. With just 15 employees, the small brand hopes to build a local following that prefers a lower-sugar alternative to the treacly big dog that’s carried in virtually every supermarket and bodega in Mexico and the U.S. alike.

Del Campo attributes much of Americans’ affinity for Mexican products to the two countries’ proximity. “We’re neighbors to Mexico,” he says. But the entrepreneur also believes there’s interest in more globally inspired drinks across the country in general, and that interest is only growing. “People are looking into more ancestral, and authentic, foods and beverages.”

The post These Mexican-Made Canned Drinks Are Giving Local Flavors Their Due appeared first on Saveur.

Recently, while visiting me in Brooklyn, my mom’s eyes went twinkly as she noticed all the wild pokeweed growing around the neighborhood. A woolgathering reminiscence of her childhood in Texas spilled forth: cooking and eating the onion-infused greens straight from the pan; her stoic anticipation as her mother added vinegar to the last dregs of poke-broth, knocking it back like a shot of whiskey.

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She was surprised to find that my New England–bred boyfriend had never heard of the poisonous, towering perennial weed, with its oblong leaves and magenta berries and stalks. Despite the fact that the kudzu-like Phytolacca americana sprouts up all across North America, poke sallet, a dish made from the plant’s slightly-less-toxic leaves, is a regional thing, popular only to Appalachia and the American South. The leaves must be boiled in water three times to cook out their toxins, and, as aficionados will tell you, it’s well worth the extra effort.

But if pokeweed is so toxic, why did people start eating it in the first place? In a word, poke sallet is survival food.

According to Michael Twitty, historian, Southern food expert, and author of The Cooking Gene, poke sallet was originally eaten for pure practicality—its toxins made it an allegedly potent tonic. “Back in the old days, you had a lot of people who walked around barefoot,” Twitty said. “They walked around barefoot in animal feces all the time. Most of our ancestors from the Depression backward were full of worms.” So then, poke sallet acted as a vermifuge, a worm purger.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center cites research showing that raw pokeweed has medicinal properties that can help cure herpes and HIV. That said, there are no clinical trials that support the use of the cooked dish as such, or as any kind of medicine, but its devotees swear by its curative qualities. Pokeweed remains a popular folk medicine, but it hasn’t been widely studied, so its healing properties remain, officially, purported.

This isn’t food that’s cooked as a dare or to be showy, like say, Japanese fugu, one of the world’s most poisonous fish, now served at Michelin-starred Suzuki in New York City. According to Nicole Taylor, chef and author of The Up South Cookbook, poke sallet is a stretch food, and it happened to be the first fresh vegetable to rise from the ground in the earliest days of spring. “When you look at foraging, that’s only what they call it now. People who were poor and people who were formerly enslaved—they had to figure out what to cook, and what to eat. You can trace different wild foods back to those folks. People who are looking for food to get by are more likely to eat poke sallet than someone who had means to eat other things.”

Though mostly obscure to the mainstream, poke sallet, which is sometimes referenced as “polk salad” or “poke salet,” has occasionally dipped its toe into the pop culture pool. Most notably, in the lyrics of “Polk Salad Annie,” by Tony Joe White, released in 1968: “Everyday for supper time / she’d go down by the truck patch / And pick her a mess of polk salad / and carry it home in a tow sack.” The song about a rural Southern girl and her family peaked at Number 8 on the Billboard Top 100 in 1969, and was later remade by Elvis in 1970, and put into regular rotation at his live shows. Country legend Dolly Parton even mentioned in her memoir that she would use crushed poke berries for lipstick as an adolescent, since her parents forbade her from wearing makeup.

Handling pokeweed is no joke. Twitty remembers messing with poke berries as a youngster, and the aching in his juice-stained hands that ensued. Using pokeweed in the kitchen requires caution—it can easily get you sick, with symptoms like vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions, and rapid heartbeat . Twitty says everyone he’s met with a connection to poke sallet says the same exact thing about it: “It will clean you out from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet.”

Yet the threat that pokeweed consumption can cause death appears to be rare. New Hampshire’s recently retired state medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Andrew, told the Concord Monitor of only one deadly incident occurring during his 20-year career. A young landscaper supposedly took a bite of raw pokeweed, mistaking it for a wild parsnip, and died 45 minutes later. One passionate pokeweed detractor, Jean Weese, a professor and food safety specialist at Auburn University, cautions strongly against consuming any amount of pokeweed, cooked or uncooked. Over email, she said she hasn’t heard of anyone dying from ingesting it, but she’s received many messages over the years from people claiming serious illness.

Foraging’s resurgence, and popularity with a set that may enjoy, say, kombucha on tap and artisanal poutine, means poke sallet is being introduced to a new cohort of eaters—who may have little to no connection to the dish’s history as survival food. In New York City, you can even learn to track down pokeweed in its prime (when it’s young and green, before it sprouts its noxious, calling-card berries and magenta stems) with a trained expert like Leda Meredith, author of “The Forager’s Feast: How to Identify, Gather, and Prepare Wild Edibles.”

Even so, it’s scarcely found on restaurant menus across the U.S., a contrast to other co-opted survival foods like okra, polenta, and grits that now proliferate on menus hawking “elevated southern fare.” Though people have been eating meticulously prepared pokeweed for centuries in the U.S. (and even longer in Africa, where the Phytolacca species is also native), the liability of accidentally poisoning a patron is not a risk many chefs are likely to take, to speak nothing of the labor-intensive task of gathering and processing the leaves.

But such chefs do exist. There are a few exceptions who delight in the greens, with their subtle, hard-to-pin-down, vaguely asparagus-meets-spinach flavor, and they serve it on their menus as both a means to educate people about regional foodways and delicious vegetable in its own right. There’s Winston Blick, a Baltimore-area chef who played around with poke sallet on the menu at his now-shuttered restaurant, Clementine (according to City Paper ), and Chef-owner Clark Barlowe, of Heirloom Restaurant in Charlotte, NC, who grew up eating the dish. It’s appeared on his all-local, Appalachian-only menu in many iterations over the years—blanched with popped sorghum or black walnuts and peanuts, grilled, and dressed with a house-made vinegar.

Sheri Castle, a Chapel Hill-based produce expert, said she wouldn’t be surprised to hear of finding pokeweed at a place like the Union Square Farmers Market in New York CIty, but could only list one chef she knew of (Barlowe) who cooks with it. Taylor said it’s definitely not something she’d expect to see at a farmers market, and laughed when asked about who might be eating it these days, saying, “I think people who are eating it now are definitely not young people.” At the many poke sallet–themed festivals that take place across the region each year (like the Harlan County Poke Sallet Festival in Kentucky, you’d be hard-pressed to find a plate of the mess. Poke sallet is merely a totem.

Will pokeweed soon find itself hailed as a beloved “it-green”? Probably not. But it’s not so far-fetched to think that on my mom’s next early spring visit, she might be able to dine on her favorite dish without having to gather the poke leaves and prepare them herself. Like Castle told me, “If you want to save a food, you have to eat it. I really believe that. If the last person who ever has a taste memory of something is gone, then we have lost our baseline.”

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