Tejate - Oaxaca's Prehispanic Energy Drink

Tejate must be the most overlooked of Oaxaca’s culinary treats. Not served in restaurants nor listed in cookbooks together with the more popular recipes for amarillito or donaji cocktails, tejate is a centuries-old drink with lots of character.

It belongs to a large family of cacao-based drinks, of which chocolate is undoubtedly the most popular. Other similar regional drinks are Tabasco’s pozol and Chiapas’ tascalate. These, like tejate, contain roasted cacao seeds and corn, but tejate also includes other ingredients: mamey seeds and rosita de cacao or flor de cacao (from the Náhuatl word cacahuaxochitl) a flower from an endemic tree of Oaxaca, which, by the way, is not the flower of the cacao tree.

Tejateras, women who prepare and sell tejate, have inherited the secrets of tejate making process, which has not changed much in the last 1,000 years. All the ingredients are roasted, grounded and blended to form a thick mixture, which is gradually thinned with cold water. Part of the tradition is to do this by hand – and arm, as the whole limb goes into the tub where tejate is prepared.

Also known as “the drink of the gods”, this Oaxacan libation was originally reserved to the ruling classes of the Zapotec society. In Pre-Hispanic times, cacao was highly valued and was actually used as currency; it was also associated to divinity. With time, it became a popular treat; served ice-cold, tejate is a very refreshing thirst-quencher. Given its high nutritional content, men used to take it to the fields for the long and exhausting days of work and still today it is an important complement of the local diet.

However, it hasn’t become as popular as it could. One of the reasons is that tejate is not known outside Oaxaca. One of the key ingredients is nowhere to be found outside the state and as it can’t be preserved, tejate cannot travel far. Only Oaxaqueños and visitors have the chance to enjoy a nice gourd of tejate. Visitors, on the other hand, are quite reluctant to try it. At first sight, tejate might not be the most enticing, some visitors (and this includes Mexicans from outside Oaxaca) have said that its appearance is rustic and that it resembles foul sink water or curd. And if we add the fear of drinking water of dubious origin, tejate has had problems making it to the top-ten of the Oaxacan culinary hit parade.

However, tejate is beginning to emerge. Already for 6 years, a tejate fair has been held yearly during February in San Andrés Huyapan, the capital of tejate. An initiative of local women, the fair found many detractors who predicted failure but were proved wrong. Now, with the help of the Ministry of Tourism, the fair is an important tourist attraction.

Those who cannot make it to the fair, and even those who can’t make it to the state now have an alternative. After many years of research, Porfirio Santiago Santaella and Lino Silva Martínez (pictured above), found a way to commercialise tejate in a very hygienic, practical and attractive way. Without the need of additives, stabilisers or preservatives, these young Oaxaqueños packed a dehydrated powder that can be mixed with water to obtain a tejate as delicious as the best tejatera’s but with very low fat.

The idea originally was not only to develop a product that could be sold but to come up with a solution to one of the state’s most urgent problems: undernourishment. Having also found a way to enrich products with iron in a way that the taste is not altered, Santaella and Martinez wanted to make an enriched tejate that could complement children’s diet and prevent anaemia, which is caused mainly by the lack of iron. This goal has not been accomplished but negotiations with private and public sponsors and investors are leading them there.

Tejatli, the commercial name of their product, can be bought in most natural and organic food stores in Oaxaca, and in markets around town; however, for a full tejate experience the traditional rite of drinking tejate in big gulps from a pumpkin gourd bowl must be tried

Oaxaca Times was given 5 samples of tejatli for its readers. Be one of the first five to write to info@oaxacatimes.com and win a free sample.