The Jamaica Market is famous for the great variety of flowers, arrangements and plants that fill its aisles; it is also an obligatory stop to buy everything related to the Day of the Dead offerings and Halloween costumes. However, since a few years ago, the offer of elotes and esquites in the Jamaica Market has become another stall that one must visit thanks to the flavors and preparations offered in the first lane of the market: esquites de suadero, chilealote, and longaniza.
In this aisle of the Jamaica Market, the stalls have long been dedicated to offering elotes and esquites daily, in addition to corn bread in presentations with cheese or pineapple. However, in 2020, due to the pandemic, sales dropped drastically, so the stallholders looked for new recipes and ways to share their products, and six months ago they started selling new flavors of elotes and esquites. Esquites of mushrooms and habanero have existed since before, but now you can also try the ones with marrow, suadero, longaniza, and the star that runs out as soon as it comes out, the chileatole.
Chileatole at the Jamaica Market.
This flavor of esquite consists, as its name implies, of a salted corn gruel, prepared with chili, thickened with corn dough and eaten as a soup or stew. Today you can see it in the Jamaica Market, but it has its origins in pre-Hispanic times when it was prepared with roasted cocoa, masa atole, chili and could also be sweetened with honey, in this recipe it was more liquid and was considered a drink. With the arrival of the Spaniards, the ingredients were modified, leaving aside the use of spice, so the drink became what we know today as champurrado. This esquite has reached our days, in different versions according to the states where it originated: Puebla, Veracruz and Tlaxcala -in the latter where there is a chileatole fair.
Tostiesquites and Elotes con Doritos at the Jamaica Market.
At Mercado de Jamaica you can also order tostiesquites, doriesquites or an elote, boiled or roasted, topped with a mixture of your favorite fried foods, which are known as "elotes locos". Prices range from $20 pesos for a small glass to a liter of flavored esquites for $50 pesos and they are open from 9 am to 11 pm. We recommend going between 12 and 4 pm when you can still find chileatole.
