AURELIO TORRES

MI MADRE’S
2201 Manor Rd
Austin, TX 78722
(512) 322-9721
www.mimadresrestaurant.com

“Yes, well they’ll be ready in the morning, like around nine in the morning and everybody’s going to be there because they know. Especially the ones, the ones that want to eat the eye—he’ll be the first one to get there.” – Aurelio Torres

Aurelio Torres was born in Raymondville, Texas, before moving as an infant with his family to Saltillo, Mexico. Torres and his family brought with them a long tradition of Sunday morning barbacoa when they moved to Austin, Texas, in 1988. He worked as a manager for a local Mexican food chain called Chuy’s before deciding that he should open his own place and serve his Saltillo-style tacos. So in 1990, Torres opened Mi Madre’s as a new Mexican restaurant on Austin’s east side. Today Mi Madre’s is a thriving business serving up Tex-Mex as well as traditional Mexican fare, including barbacoa.

Listen to this 3-minute audio clip Aurelio Torres talking about the tradition of cooking barbacoa. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Aurelio Torres
Date: November 8, 2007
Location: Mi Madre’s – Austin, TX
Fieldwork Director: Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt
Fieldwork Team: Marvin Bendele

Produced in association with the American Studies Department at The University of Texas at Austin and the Central Texas Barbecue Association.

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Aurelio Torres: My name is Aurelio Torres and my birthday is May twelfth, forty-nine. We’re basically—we’re from Saltillo, Coahuila. We left, and my wife and I—we’re both from there and we have all our relatives living, and all our families living there. And, that’s where we were raised. Not born—well, I was born in Texas, but since I was a very little boy, baby actually, they took me down to Mexico, because my mom was from Mexico and she wanted to live there in Saltillo, all of my life.

Marvin Bendele: Oh, Okay, and how long have you and your wife been in Austin, or in Texas?

Sure, we came here in 1988 from Saltillo. We decided that we wanted to—to move over here because I learned English, you know, when I was a teenager. So, I was going, “I feel like coming back to the States because I was born in the United States, well, from here.” So we decided to move here basically because of all the nice, beautiful trees, laid back city, we loved it. We loved—this is our city.

Did you move straight to Austin, I guess, and did you open the place as soon as you got here? Give me a little bit of history on that?

Yeah, well, no I came—basically somebody offered me a job. It was a big company called Chuy’s Mexican Restaurant. They were starting to—the business being open for about three or four years, and they started to have some problems. So I say, “Well, I’ll help you.” I had been in management for some time in Mexico, so I know. I know, you know, about basic [indiscernible] problems. And I come in, and I stayed there with them a couple of years, and then I decided to open my own business. So I came here, and I found out about—I wanted to live close to the University of Texas. And, so I found this place, I was lucky enough, nobody wanted it, so I say, “I’ll take it.” Little did I know that it was going to be such a huge success.

And what was the reasoning in being close to the University of Texas?

I wanted to—I wanted to be around, surrounded by students, people who are more—actually more knowledgeable. I come from Saltillo and it’s—we have a large university base also. And you see a lot of students, a lot of people that are very smart. So I wanted to be surrounded by that. That was one of my main reasons—I wanted to learn from the best, actually, and being surrounded by the best, you know, the students of the University of Texas, I decided that this was the place.

Kind of a little slice of home, I guess, being surrounded by the university. So I guess you started out with Chuy’s managing the restaurant?

Correct. I was a kitchen manager there for a couple of years. And I decided they no longer needed my help. So, I decided I’d, you know, move. I wanted to move on, and really open my own place. I felt that—one of the reasons at that time was that most of the restaurants that were selling tacos were, I mean, they’re really weren’t very good at all. So I decided I can do better than that. You know, cause I came from a place in Mexico where it’s—we’re the king of tacos, and I said I can do better tacos than that, you know. So I decided I’ll open my own place selling tacos. And that was the reason that I came here.

I guess, let’s just start off real quick, can you tell me—how you’ve grown up preparing barbacoa? Just kind of run me through the process of what you consider barbacoa to be.

Yes, indeed, barbacoa is like your yearly celebration of Thanksgiving here. We do that pretty much every day—every day. For us, it is a Thanksgiving everyday. We—that was a family gathering also, celebrations. We don’t do turkeys, but we do barbacoa. We don’t do roast beef; we do barbacoa. Basically because that’s the easiest way for us to—to cook our meat, in a way. It’s got it’s own system to do it, but mainly it was celebration. You have a celebration, a family celebration, a gathering, and they expect you to serve barbacoa. And if you do, they’ll be coming back to you. And that’s what you wanted; you wanted that relationship with the family, the gatherings. And they love you, and of course, we were very happy. We’re very—we need the family together, and we wanted to talk on the weekends, and that was—that was our main deal, to make barbacoa. Barbacoa is—at that time we made it in—we put it on the dirt soil. We built a, a hole, actually, but it’s got it’s own measurements. You cannot just build any hole. You’ve got to be—that’s different techniques for building it. You got to know those techniques. One of those techniques, you have got to make sure there’s not a sewer close by—to begin with. Also, or any pipes, or any caves surround it, because the heat tends to go away if you’re not careful where you make your hole, where you’re going to cook the barbacoa, it will not come out as good. It will be wrong. So, once you do that, it’s got different measurements, and, basically, it’s like one meter by one—about ninety centimeters square. Or around—a diameter—and by about a meter, which is about three feet down—down. And, usually, you are very careful where you, make the—say—make the hole. And then, what you do, you surround it with—on the bottom, you put on the bottom the blue rock. The blue rock is a round rock that are in the rivers. I don’t know if you are familiar with that kind of rock. It’s the ones that usually you find on the rivers from the bottom. And—it’s the one that goes, you know, with the water, that moves with—

Sure, yeah, I think I know—

I don’t know what you call it. We call it the blue rock. But it’s kind of roundish, and you pick up medium size pieces. I would say somewhere like maybe six—that’s about six inches—six inches, somewhere around there. So they’re big round rocks. You put them on the bottom, and then, and you build it up a little bit to the top of the sides. That’s how you build your—that’s going to be your base.

With the rock on the sides?

With the rock on the sides too. As much as you can, kind of, going around like that. Build it maybe a foot higher. And that’s where you’re going to lay your meat. Now, you don’t lay your meat just by itself. What you do is—hmmm, you first you build up your fire. You put a lot of firewood. We prefer, sometimes, with the mesquite to heat up the rocks. And you heat up as much to see them red. So, that they’ll—so that’s going to be your fire base, or your heat base.

The rocks themselves are red?

The rocks themselves. Yes, when you hear them, they start cracking, the rocks, because all the heat—they’re almost ready.

OK.

And, usually, basically you do that when it’s getting dark, because you’re going to usually wait and do it at night, in the evening. Like somewhere around six, seven p.m. you start building your fire and you start getting—getting it hot, real hot. And I’m talking about inside the hole. Once you do that, you take all the – extract all the—whatever didn’t get burned. All your firewood, you don’t leave any because you don’t want to smoke the meat.

Oh, OK.

OK, so you do not leave anything—anything that will make smoke. What you want is the hot rocks. So you have got to have, like, your tools—proper tools to make sure you reach in because you don’t want to do it with your hands. It’s too hot.

How do you get all the—it’s ash by then, right?

Ash by then, yes. Actually, it’s all right. You don’t have to pick up everything. All you do is—something that will smoke. That it, will be smoldering, in other words. The ash is fine, the ash is fine. Now, there are different meats you can use. In the North, we only use beef: a beef head, the tongue, the cheeks, the lips, the ox lips. And, so it depends. You go in the South, they will use: lamb, ram, or I don’t know what—You build your fire—your heat—heat all the rocks and then—by then, you start preparing because you’re going to leave it for a little while to get all—this is a process, probably takes about a couple of hours by the time you’re done. And your hole is ready with enough heat. Then what you do in the meantime, you’re washing your—the head, or the cheeks, or any part of the beef, actually. You can do any part of the beef. But we do the cheapest cuts, which are the toughest ones and that’s one of the—one of the reasons the meat tastes so good. I just gave you some barbacoa to taste. And that is ox lips that we use here. It is the—it is the lips of the head.

OK, it is the lips.

Of the cow—of the ox. And that is—it is a delicacy, when you’re doing it right. It’s really not complicated at all. You wash it; make sure it’s real clean.

Is it, is it something that you do, obviously you do it overnight—but do you—do you have friends come over and you guys hang out and—or—

Yes, well they’ll be ready in the morning, like around nine in the morning and everybody’s going to be there because they know. Especially the ones, the ones that want to eat the eye—he’ll be the first one to get there.

 [Laughs].

And, by then, of course, they’re going to be sharing, bringing some tortillas, and some of them are going to make the hot sauce, which is another part of the barbacoa process also—pico de gallo and anything else that they want to bring in. But basically all you need is the barbacoa and the tortillas because it really makes a lot of meat. It really makes a lot of meat.

So—what, aside from—obviously the cook gets the—where you said the cook gets one of the eyes, and you said the one with the most authority gets the other eye. How do you determine who has the most authority? Is it by age? Or—

It’s probably my wife [Laughs]. Yeah, that’s probably, or, or your mother, if she likes it. Or my mother—at that time, my mother loved eyes. That’s the only part that she liked. Or your father, or your grandparents. You know, so you decide which one. And not everybody likes them, but the ones who like them, they tell you that’s the best thing of the barbacoa.

All right, all right. Well—so how did you learn the process?

It’s a family tradition. Pretty much everybody in Mexico—well no, I wouldn’t say everybody, but a lot of people love—know how to make barbacoa. Every morning, at every corner in Saltillo, you’ll find barbacoa sellers. And you find different styles, but basically all pretty much cooked the same, but some of them make it a lot better. You know, I define my barbacoa. I like it fresh, most of the time, I like it fresh. I like it not greasy, not very greasy. And usually when you go—and I dare you, next time that you go find barbacoa somewhere, they’re going to give you a dark piece of meat, you know, pieces of meat that is kind of very, very greasy. And they call it barbacoa. That’s not barbacoa. That’s frozen barbacoa that has been there probably for the past six months. But that’s—you know, I mean, not everybody can afford or knows how to do it here in the States. So—so, they do the best they can.

Is there a taste difference in doing it in the pressure cooker, aside from doing it like you would do for your family? Or—

If you do it right, there’s not too much, not too much—there’s different tricks to do it. So, true, of course, there is a very minor difference. But if you never taste it before, you will not—you will not know.

Well, without giving away any secrets, is the—do you still do the leaves in the pressure cooker and things like that? And wrapping it—wrapping it in burlap and what not?

Yes, I skip the burlap because I can’t find burlaps here as easy as in Mexico. But I use the foil, and I use the leaves. I can use the leaves. I mean I use the leaves. But I don’t need that many—just one leaf. I can put it on top, because obviously, I don’t need to protect it, just to give the flavor to the meat.

So, I had a question—oh, so where can you get—get beef heads around here, for stuff like that?

Some markets have it here. I do have one here. Longhorn Meat has good, excellent quality meat for—to make barbacoa—beef heads. They sell them frozen, but that’s OK. The barbacoa with the heads, it’s OK, buying them frozen.

As long as it’s not—you don’t freeze the meat after it’s—after you’ve cooked it?

No, no, no. As long as you don’t refreeze it again—you’re going to lose flavor.

Well, um, so you were talking about you yield about—did you say fifty pounds?

Fifty percent.

Fifty per cent, I’m sorry. So, it was about thirty-five pounds.

Yeah, about thirty-five, thirty-two to thirty-five pounds.

So, how many—is it all beef head, or are you using other cuts?

I’m—no it’s beef head and lips. Yeah, I don’t use the eyes. The eyes are gone. We eat the eyes. You don’t worry about the eyes. You’re not going to get any eyes [Laughs]. Sorry.

Well, so how many heads does that take to—per batch?

One, one, one head, and—yeah, just one—just one head. And you’re going to get the tongue—but the tongue also, we separate the tongue. The tongue will be higher in price than anything else. The eyes? Forget about it. It’s going to be very expensive for you [Laughter]…Anyway. You separate them, the head to tongue, you get the cheeks, you got the lips of the beef, and that’s basically where you find most of your meat from the head because there’s not going to be no brains. There’s not going to be any—undesirable kind of meat—just the outside that you’re going to have.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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