Burlap & Barrel: The Makings of Sazon and Adobo

Because you may have been interested to know

This is a post for all subscribers.

If you’re a paid subscriber, please leave your Instagram handle in the comments so that I can add you to my “close friends” section of Instagram. I’m taking a break from posting content on my feed, but will post random Shit on my stories and even that I want to be able to control who sees it.

Buy Mami a burger, send her a Starbucks gift card (grande hot mocha with whip) or nail polish at the Dollar Tree:

Venmo: @illya-maiso

Mami Maisonet
5960 S Land Park #222
Sacramento, CA 95822

---

MY LAST COOKING CLASS!

This will be my last cooking class until December. Book tour things are starting to ramp up and September is right around the corner. So, if you’d like to take your adobo and sazon blends around the block under the guidance of me…SIGN UP FOR THIS CLASS!!!!!!!

Mofongo Class | Saturday, August 27, 2022

---

Don’t forget that my pre-orders for my book are still going! And it’s just as important as it was when I announced it last week.

PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY NOW!

---

Guess what?! We have an official release date for the Sazon and Adobo blends:

Sunday, August 28.

BUT!!!!! For those who subscribe to my newsletter, you will have the opportunity to pre-order the blends a week before the blends are rolled out to the general public. Which means…RIGHT NOW! Are you excited?! No? That’s ok.

And every time you purchase one of my seasonings by clicking this link below, I receive 10% of the sales.

Or, Clicking This Link Right Here

w

“I didn’t know you had your own seasonings!” That’s because up until April 24, 2022 I hadn’t told y’all. I kept my mouth shut for two years while Burlap & Barrel and I worked on the blends. Y’all know how hard it is for me to hold water when it comes to telling my business. And sometimes y’alls business too. Anyway.

Like most folks in the US, I grew up with Morton salt and McCormick’s black pepper in the little tin canister. Unlike most folks in the US, I also grew up with Goya’s sazon and adobo blends. I started making my own sazon and adobo blends in culinary school (2009) because it was a way to make some money. It probably wasn’t until a 2015 episode of Mind Of A Chef, where April Bloomfield visits Jacobsen Salt Co, in Netarts, OR that I even started to think of salt as something…not Morton. I feel like anyone who saw that episode immediately romanticized the process. And the brand!

I remember having a conversation with my partner around ten-years ago, in the back of an Uber, about salt. We were on our way to the Jacobsen showroom in Portland, OR. By the time we arrived to our location, the driver turned around and said, “I don’t think I knew anything about salt. But, I do now.” This doesn’t mean I’m totally anti-Morton. You’ll see in my cookbook that Morton table salt is essential to one of the hardest recipes in my cookbook. Pre-Orders Available, btdubs. But, once you have been lured into the cult of salt, there’s no going back. Consider those snowflake-like crystals sodium hallucinogens because they’re about to take you on a trip, expand your mind and open up a world of possibilities in the land of, “Where the fuck does this shit come from?”

I reached out to Ethan at B&B in 2020, “have y’all ever thought of doing a salt-free sazon or adobo blend? And if so, can we collab?” I’d like to say it was as simple as that. It was and wasn’t. Luckily, I already had a relationship with the brand. They have amazing shit. Fortunately, the originator of a nationally available sazon brand was currently under fire for its allegiances with capitalism over community. I say fortunately because a lot of smaller brands that had been trying to push their sazon and adobo to the national market for years had finally gotten their opportunity!

A salt-free adobo and sazon blend is something I’ve always made at home because of my Nana’s own battle with diabetes and just trying to keep Mami’s health on the up and up (knocks on wood). To take my own home blend and turn it into something available to the masses was a dream step. However natural something may feel, in the world of commerce, it ain’t always available to us. What was not a natural step was low-key becoming a person who now sourced achiote on her own.

Achiote has been used in Puerto Rico since pre-contact. There are documented accounts of the Taino (now a term being challenged because it is said that No 16th-century Spanish documents use this word to refer to the tribal affiliation or ethnicity of the natives of the Greater Antilles.) using it for cooking as well as painting their faces. This is because the Taino are said to have reached the island of Boriken (Borinquen/Boriquén) by traveling the waters from South America, where achiote is also used in cooking.

Achiote gives most of Puerto Rican cuisine its inviting orange hue. Much like its used in the commercial food industry for the orange color of cheddar cheese. The flavor isn’t very strong, a subtle floral mustiness just kind of lingers in the background. Anyone who’s ever made achiote oil knows the experience of inhaling in that perfume when the achiote seeds hit the hot oil when we’re preparing it for pasteles.

The Guatemalan achiote seeds that B&B already had on their shelves was too dark for my own liking. I was used to the bright red pre-ground achiote from India. And no, I couldn’t just use any achiote. I had to use an achiote that was aligned with B&B’s ethos; single origin sourced directly from the farmer. B&B focuses on single origin spices from around the world. “All of their spices are capable of being traced back to a single area of production — even a single farm or cooperative of farmers. It also means that each of their spices exhibits its own unique terroir — the environment where its grown imbues a unique set of flavors and smells to the spice, similar to how grapes from France produce different wines than grapes from Argentina.

Other spices are...well, from many different origins. Often, the spices you're buying are sourced from many, many different farms from a handful of countries. High- and low-quality lots are blended together for consistency and cost, and so much of the flavor is lost along the way.”

Our achiote can be traced back to one farmer in San Sebastian, Puerto Rico.

From all of the work I had done in Puerto Rico over the last five-years, I had developed and nurtured some contacts. And I contacted them all. A few of them responded. Most of them ghosted me. In the end, only one came through. It was during this process that I learned the Puerto Rican term for ghosting, “La Pichaera.” Several Puerto Rican businesses had given my ass La Pichaera, fer sure.

The person that did come through was someone who works directly with farmers. I won’t say this person’s name just out of respect for their privacy as some people are straight weirdos and thieves. Yeah, I’m gatekeeping. And?

A supermarket plastic produce bag full of whole achiote seeds from Puerto Rico arrived on my doorstep in California. I put some of the seeds in a small coffee grinder until they turned into a sort of clay-colored sticky dust. I sat in my kitchen, grinding, combining and weighing various measurements of seasonings (oregano, turmeric, garlic powder, cumin seeds) until the adobo smelled, looked and tasted how I thought they should. I wrote down formulas and increment amounts. Then I’d send them to B&B. May I remind you how terrible I am at Math and Science? And this process made made me question everything. Does achiote bloom over time, releasing its vibrancy? The achiote was still too dark. Goddamnit! Perhaps blend it with paprika? No. If Puerto Ricans saw paprika on the ingredient label of sazon they’d lose their minds. Saffron? Too expensive. Go with it anyway? The sazon was so damn difficult to get right. It just did not look how I thought a sazon should look! It didn’t look how we’re used to sazon looking. And that’s for good reason.

Yellow 5 and red 40 dyes are listed in the ingredients on the back of Goya’s sazon. These dyes create the vibrant color we've all become accustomed to. I'd like to say that the color cannot be duplicated without dyes, but Loisa has managed to create a very vibrant sazon blend without dyes or adding things like paprika or turmeric. I honestly don't know how they do it, but fucking kudos to them. I had to have a long and honest discussion with myself (after Ethan had a long and honest discussion with me) about the realities behind why sazon looks the way it does and why mine probably wasn’t gonna look like that. I was going to have to accept this or move on. Clearly, I accepted.

The above blend to the left is mine and the blend to the right is Goya.

We chose the design of the label together. They chose the color palette, to match my book. So cute. I drew the coqui on the label (modeled after the Taino petroglyphs of coqui-frogs found all over the island). I wrote my signature on a piece of paper, scanned it, sent it and they put it on the bottle.

I’m thankful that I got to work with a brand like B&B. Not just because they have a good product, but because Ethan also understood that my ass was broke! Even to create a recipe, I needed…a scale and a coffee grinder! My account was negative at the time (low-key still is) and I didn’t even have $10 to my name to purchase a fucking scale and grinder on Amazon. Ethan was like, “we got you!” and sent me both. So many brands don’t get that. Most of the time creators are working on spec because brands are used to working with people with access to money. Or, they’re just taking advantage of creators.

There are many things I’ve been in my life: non-profit youth advocate, shoe salesperson, grocery bagger, food truck corresponder, cook and writer. Somehow over the last two years I started sourcing achiote. The achiote I use is directly from small farmers in Puerto Rico. And if anyone has done business in Puerto Rico, you KNOW how much of a challenge it is to get someone to commit, meet deadlines and just have a general sense of urgency. Shit just moves slower or sometimes doesn’t move at all.

In the end, we created the first and only sazon on the market that includes wild achiote from Puerto Rico. And even if this sazon isn’t seen as “authentic,” or as “Puerto Rican,” knowing the aforementioned makes me okay with all of that. Because I know I tried my hardest.