CityFood Magazine - Seriously Sandwich: Mexico's Cemita

Workers form the front line in anticipation of the morning rush for cemitas at Puebla's Las Poblanitas.

SERIOUSLY SANDWICH

To take liberities with metaphors, The new Las Tortas on Cambie Street (located between 17 and 18th), manages to hits two tamale trains with one stone. First, it's part of the improving options for casual Latin food in Vancouver, and second, it's right on time for the renewed popularity of the mega-size sandwich.

At Las Tortas, the featured item is pretty much an authentic take on the kind of everyday street food that Mexicans (especially office workers in Mexico City) custom order on a regular basis from small, street side, hole-in-the-wall restaurants and public market places. The biggest difference for this Canadian version being the fancier (okay 'gourmet') nature of some of the ingredients, as well as an operation streamliner that requires customers to tick off filling choices from a list printed down the side of a brown paper bag before it is handed to the sandwich assembler. To tell the truth, if you don't speak Spanish, that feature would actually be handier in Mexico where pointing and miming often has to suffice for the local's method of elbowing to the counter and yelling out one's preferences to the "sandwichologists".

Even in Mexico however, there are tortas and there are super-tortas. The best example of the later being the Cemita , a traditional sandwich that is a specialty of the central Mexican towns of Puebla and Cholula.

Puebla's Mercado del Carmen is where " Las Poblanitas " one of the most famous cemita makers is located, and it's a perpetually noisy, frantic scene as up to a dozen sandwich makers, looking like crack surgery teams in their face masks, hairnets and white uniforms, slap together sandwiches as big as cabbages before the advancing waves of customers pressing against their work stations. Wading pool-size wicker baskets containing sesame seed-covered buns (3-inches high, crusty on the outside, soft and white on the inside) are delivered fresh from the town bakeries each morning. Sliced through the middle, the tops of these rolls get elevated an additional two to three inches from their bottoms via meaty stuffing ingredients such as: hot barbacoa (pit-cooked lamb); milanesa (thin, plate sized slabs of crispy breaded beef); jamon (ham); or carnitas (deep-fried pork chunks). Onions, avocado slices, fresh jalapenos, sun-dried peppers, they too get heaped on the towering pile. However, the two most distinguishing ingredients of the cemita are the dark-green citrus-y tasting leaves called papalo and the thick snarl of stringy white Oaxacan cheese that trails out the sides of each sandwich like paper streamers. Balanced on the sides of your paper plate you'll also get a couple of chipotle peppers to crank up the heat and some pickled carrots for zing.

Attacking a cemita is serious business. In fact, the act of eating one can give a diner a look reminiscent of those Wild Kingdom slow motion videos of sharks ... rolling back their eyes and sinking down a retractable upper jaw before biting and tearing. We've seen children enthusiastically plowing through cemitas that were bigger than their heads. But proof positive of the sandwiches macho status is the fact that is a favourite with Mexico's intimidating narcotics police. Canadian cops may favour frosted Tim Hortons ' doughnuts, but the Narcos , dressed like Star Wars storm troopers and toting AK-47 automatic rifles, are likely to show up at the cemitas stands for lunch. Concealed from head to toe in black to avoid even an eyelash's recognition from the drug gangs, it may be the only time all day they lower their bandanas and balaclava masks in order to eat. Yet, even they, tend to get sauce and veggie bits all over themselves in the process.

More photos from the Los Poblanitas stand are posted below.