Doña Vale ​Food

Sunday, October 29

Months before our trip, we did some research on Latin America, the cities we wanted to visit and the local food in the different countries. In order to prepare for Latin America, we watched the series “Street Food Latin America” on Netflix. One of the episodes was about the typical food in the city of Oaxaca in Mexico and about the life of “Doña Vale” — one of the many vendors at the local market in Oaxaca.

At this point we had already planned to spend some time in Oaxaca and were keen to visit the city's huge market. The Netflix series is about Doña Vale who is a grandma now and who, many years ago as a young, single mom, started renting a stall in the market in Oaxaca to sell “memelas”. “Memelas” are a slightly thicker, oval-shaped version of corn tortillas. They are made from purple or yellow corn. Doña Vale's memelas are baked and then spread with a homemade, smoky, spicy chili salsa and sprinkled with Mexican white cheese. Over the years, Doña Vale continued to improve her recipe for her red salsa and at some point word got around in the market and in the city that Doña Vale had the very best smoked chili salsa in the region. Doña Vale's small food stand became more and more popular and she herself was known at the “Central de Abastos” market in Oaxaca. After the Netflix series “Street Food Latin America” and the report on Doña Vale had aired, Doña Vale suddenly became known not only in Oaxaca, but internationally. Almost every day, tourists from the USA and Europe visit Doña Vale's food stand at the huge "Central de Abastos" market in Oaxaca.

We obviously also wanted to eat at Doña Vale’s to find out whether her homemade salsa really tasted so much better than other Mexican salsas. So one day we made our way to the “Central de Abastos” market in Oaxaca, which was so huge and confusing that even after many subsequent visits we always got lost. The market consists of hundreds of small stands next to each other, very narrow aisles and a thousand possible junctions. The market is a huge maze and we only found Doña Vale’s stall using Google Maps. When we arrived at the stand, we immediately recognized Doña Vale, who was very busy flipping memelas on the plancha. The line at the stand was very long that day because during the Day of the Dead festivities there are usually a lot of international tourists in Oaxaca, who all seemed to have watched the same Netflix episode as us. When we finally bit into our fresh memelas after having waited in line for a while, I realized two things: 1. The wait was worth it because the memelas with salsa really tasted great and indeed very unique! And 2. The salsa was soo much spicier than I had imagined!

Overall, we were thrilled with both the food and the whole experience of visiting the market and getting to know Doña Vale. Despite the sudden fame from Netflix, the prices were reasonable and Doña Vale cooked quietly and concentratedly, shaping each individual memela herself by hand and was not deterred by the long line of people waiting.