If you are new to the site, you might not have become aware of the glory and wonder of stews and soups, which I like to collectively refer to as stewroids. As the last stewroids article dropped almost four years ago, you can click these words to check out all of the awesome soups and stews I’ve discovered that have fueled the hypertrophic and strength shenanigans of all of the biggest and strongest people in the world throughout the centuries. I’ve covered everything from the well-known chankonabe of the Japanese sumo (which allows them to carry more muscle mass than professional bodybuilders, in spite of the fact they’re drug free and typically don’t lift) to the ceebu jen of the gigantic, hyperstrong Senegalese wrestlers, busting out historically accurate recipes alongside historical context to really drive home the whys and wherefores of awesomeness and how it relates to and relies on stew.

To See All of the Other Stewroids, Click These Words

When I lived in Tucson, I trained at World Gym, which was a super hardcore old school throwback bodybuilding gym filled with people your gym owner would throw out on the first day. Where I am now a combination of mascot and pariah in every gym in which I train for my beatdown deathcore screaming, random dance moves, and wild-eyed intensity even when just fucking around on cables for arms, I probably wasn’t even a tier-one weirdo in World Tucson. One of the genuinely weird guys was a fast-talking geared bencher who trained with a former Westsider I couldn’t stand and whose name I couldn’t recall. He and I would train together on occasion because in spite of the fact he was a portly 240 pound short dude, he liked to train fast and heavy like my ex-wife and I did.

Then the dude just randomly stopped showing up to the gym, and for three weeks in January we all wondered if he’d died, because it was ’97 and there was no social media and not everyone had cell phones. As it happened, he wasn’t dead but just nearly so, having been stabbed 27 times in Nogales, Mexico on New Year’s Eve. It being Mexico and him being him, he walked across the border and drove to a hospital in Tucson, which was about an hour away. Luckily for him, it was pre-911, so he could drive through a customs checkpoint covered in stab wounds… yeah, let that sink in. At the border we would walk through and just flash our licenses lazily at the border cops before getting in our car. Ahhh, memories.

Anyway, he’d tried to slide up on some dude’s girl and he got stabbed, which is exactly the outcome you would expect, because Mexicans have long been known for stabbing people just because it’s a day that ends in “y.” Saying Mexicans like to cut people is like saying people from Mississippi love to be obese and stupid- it might not be accurate to a person, but the picture they paint as a people certainly looks a lot like Big Left’s Boxcutta could easily be voted their national anthem. And while you might think it racist to make such a claim, it’s hardly so- the native peoples of Mexico had a long history of violence and martial arts prior to the arrival of the Spanish, so the Spanish fetish for bladework seamlessly melded with Mexican culture in the exact same way it did in the Philippines.

If you’re wondering why I’m not taking this all the way back to the ancient world, or at least the Middle Ages and the Aztecs, there’s absolutely no information on Aztec martial arts beyond knowledge that there were some. The Mesoamerican people were brutal as fuck, and wars had raged all over the Central American isthmus for dominance and prisoners to sacrifice (and possibly eat). Tragically, the arrival of the Europeans came with the arrival of European diseases, and by the time the Aztecs and other native peoples could meet the Europeans on the field of battle, their ranks were already decimated. Entire cities were depopulated, temples were choked with corpses as deaths outpaced the ability to dispose of them, and the great civilizations of the Americas became sepulchers.

Thus, you should no more denigrate the Mesoamericans for having failed to adequately defend themselves (hey, in the past, that was the prevailing theory) than you should the disappeared and displaced non-Indo-European peoples of Europe when the horse-riding Yamnaya swept in and killed everyone who hadn’t died of plague with their legendary axes. Those people are the mythological Aryans, and although they managed to spread their genes and language all over Eurasia, they eventually vanished from the face of the Earth, leaving behind a bunch of weird language and culture isolates like the Basques as the only living relics of pre-Indo-European invasion. Shit happens when you party, and as Covid has shown us, parties are a hell of a way to spread a disease, even if those parties are conducted with a bunch of pointy metal shit.

Obviously, that’s not to say that Mesoamericans can’t fight with their hands (they produce the best lightweight boxers in the world), but

“There is more science in knifing a rival than dwellers in the North imagine – To see the weapon used under the most favorable conditions one must seek Mexico and the South American Countries –
Positions described by a man who knows all about them.

Not everyone in our country knows what a tricky science there is behind the use of the knife as a weapon of offense and defense, but let him travel away to the South or Southwest among the people browned by the sun and a new and deadly phase of the man-fighting art comes to the surface.

Knife fighting seems generally to be a weakness of Southern denizens as well in the Old World as the new. South of Mason and Dixon’s line is this country it is no unusual thing even at this day to find a bad man who prides himself on his superior science with the thing, but to get into real knife territory one must go into the Mexican and South American countries.

Here he will find desperadoes innumerable whose use of the knife for generations has evolved into a well defined science, as distinctly so almost as the use of the fists in this country by exponents of that art. The origin of true knife science is said to have been Andalusia, where its use was brought to great perfection. Hence in South America, when a native is particularly renowned as a deft wielder of the short blade, he is petted by his friends by being referred to as having sprung of true Andalusian stock” (Choinard).

“Then the foul kick for the stomach is a trick that makes the new world knife fighter altogether ahead of his Andalusian prototype for practical results. All fighting Mexicans or vaqueros wear boots with high tops and heels and heavy thick soles, with which one is liable to receive a ripping side kick under the guard at an unexpected moment. The way is paved for the foot blow by a series of continuous hoisting of the right knee during sparring” (Chouinard).

That said, Andalusian knife fighting is a hybrid art that involves no small amount of grappling and striking, and because of it the Mexicans became known for being fearsome one on one fighters, even while their martial prowess isn’t exactly held in high international esteem. That said, soldiering and hand-to-hand combat are not necessarily good indicators that prowess in one will indicate prowess in the other. Thus, let us not dismiss the physical prowess of the Mexican people, because their turn-of-the-century fighting methods would not look the least bit out of place in John Wick, and are a rad combination of vicious 19th century dirty boxing, Spanish knife fighting, and I would guess savate, due to their predilection for kicking motherfuckers while wearing their heeled vaquero (Southwestern US / Mexican cowboy) boots (and influenced in no small part by Jesse Enkamp’s recent video on the subject, but it makes sense given France’s conquest of Mexico [1861-67] and the fact that the hands were only used for blocking in savate at that time).

Regardless of its roots, even the most badass knife fighters of the war-ravaged lands of 19th Century United States respected and feared the knife skills of the people living in the Southwest and Mexico. It might have been for the fact that Mexican knife fighters generally killed you so quickly you didn’t even know you were in a goddamn knife fight- you’d just insult a Mexican and find your guts on the ground when you took the next drag off of your cigarette.

“The old Spanish gentleman used to stand nearly erect in the knife duel and handle his instrument something after the manner of a sword, but the Spanish-American squats beyond dignity, whirls his blade in a circle from his nimble wrist to dazzle his adversary, and attempts in all manner of ways to alarm and unnerve his opponent for a safe opening. Mexicans fighting among themselves usually throw off the sombrero and sometimes mutually agree to the serape, but when a greaser gets into close-quarter fighting with white bordermen the sombrero is just what he wants. Circling about his adversary and getting him into a stiff, waiting guard, he will suddenly lash his big hat into the man’s face and have him disemboweled before he is aware of the stratagem” (Ibid). 

So it is fairly safe to say that the physical prowess of the Mexican people has been established, we can move on to the deliciousness that fuels them. In the past I have covered the long and storied history of nature’s best protein bar, the taco (click these words for recipes for tacos mineros and tacos al pastor), but now it is time to cover the stunning culinary accouterment to that delectable hand-held hypertrophy- Mexican Tortilla Soup.

Forewarned is forearmed- the more I learn about the history of cooking, the more I find that “authentic” recipes and their proponents can go fuck themselves, because authentic food is usually whatever poor people can throw together and make taste decent, and food is constantly evolving. No recipe is a monolith, except perhaps the Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe, and this recipe is thus not going to be what the dude who runs your local bodega’s abeula would make on a Sunday- this is what a white American dude who can cook made using the shit that was already in his house (i.e. authentic).

That said, the basis for this recipe is chicken tortilla soup, which originally hails from Mexico City (known under the Aztecs as Tenochtichlan when it was the capital of their Empire). And if you’re thinking chicken isn’t authentic anything for the New World, you’re right- the chicken wasn’t introduced until the Spanish arrived in 1519- the Mexica of the Aztec Empire and their allies were more into stewing up people, it seems. In fact, it is now thought that the Aztecs essentially engineered their own undoing by capturing and eating a force of over 400 soldiers, women, and children dispatched by the governor of Cuba to stop Cortes’ invasion. They did so over the course of eight months, only killing and eating the women after they were visibly pregnant, and broadcasting the festivities throughout the Empire so much so that the population of the city hosting the eight month cannibal feast grew significantly… before Cortes retaliated by killing everything and everyone (Gershon). If you want to use human flesh to authentic this dish up, feel free to do so- just keep a lookout for megalomaniacal, xenophobic, voice-hearing, blood-drenched Spanish dickheads for a year or so afterwards, just to be safe.

Chicken Tortilla Stew

As I explained at the outset of this series nearly a decade ago, there is no real consensus on soup versus stew, beyond the fact that stew is a more hearty, generally thicker version of what a similar soup would be. The names are more or less interchangeable, despite what many people thing, but for the purposes of satisfying your brain’s need to put puzzle pieces in their places I added extra meat and seasonings to an extant soup recipe, then altered it a bit further due to the limitations of my cupboard. Given that the original recipe was probably a cannibal bean soup, it really doesn’t matter what we call it, for it is satisfying enough to have turned man-eaters away from the “long-pig” and towards this delicious conglomeration of New World ingredients.

If you’re curious about chicken tortilla soup’s actual history and “authentic” recipe, you’re pretty much shit out of luck. Historians can only agree that chicken tortilla soup hails from Mexico City, likely in the 19th century.

“Classic tortilla soup, the way you’d find it in Mexico City, is simply good chicken broth combined with roasted tomatoes, onion, garlic, chiles and tortillas, cut into strips and fried. It’s wonderfully satisfying, “a sort of soul food soup,” as Mexican cooking authority Diana Kennedy puts it.

In California, it’s often made with a tomato base thickened with ground tortillas, but there are variations, such as a bean soup enriched with crunchy strips of fried tortillas.

‘To be really authentic, the soup should have only a little white onion, raw not cooked, blended with roasted tomato’”

Ingredients

• Store-bought tortilla strips (I just crush our local store’s house-made tortilla chips) or you can make them yourself. Or use Fritos- the world is literally your oyster.
• 3 boneless skinless chicken breasts
• 2 TBSP olive oil
• 1 onion chopped 1 jalapeño diced and seeded
• 2 large dried ancho chilies
• 2 chipotles in adobo, finely chopped
  • I used a liberal amount of South African Smoke Seasoning because I lacked the chipotles in adobo and didn’t even have smoked chilies like ancho or guajillo onhand I could have pulverized and added.  You could even try a dash of liquid smoke, but you definitely want some smoke flavor in there, so figure it out.
• Half to whole head of garlic for me, but if you’re a fan of Schitt’s Creek or Last Man Standing you might want to go with three cloves or so, because bland recognizes bland.
• 1½ TSP ground cumin
• 1½ TSP chili powder
• 14 ½ ounces crushed tomatoes
• 1 can diced tomatoes with chilis (Rotel tomatoes with chilis in the US)
• 3 cups chicken broth
• 14 ½ ounces can black beans, rinsed & drained 
• 1 cup can corn, drained
• ¼ cup cilantro chopped
• ¼ cup lime juice or juice of one lime
• 1 avocado sliced, for garnish

Directions

My method for making this is slightly different because I utterly despise big chucks of meat in my stews- I want a more even distribution of ingredients per spoonful than the typical shredded chicken allows. Plus, I eat blindly while reading as a general rule, and big chunks of chicken flop off of my spoon and splatter all over whatever book I am reading, which is annoying. I’ve also been a fan of minced foods since I lived in China, as they’re ultra easy to eat blind. Thus, I own a Chinese cleaver that I love, and I mince every motherfucking thing I can, every day of my life.

Mincing the chicken right out of the gate will allow it to chook more quickly and evenly, plus it gives your stew a super consistent mouthfeel more along the lines of a chicken chili than chicken soup. If you don’t wanna, you can just drop the chicken breasts into the shit whole and simmer them for twenty minutes, then take out the chicken, pull it, and return it to the soup for another 10 minutes.

1. Mince your chicken to somewhere between minced meat and 1/2″ chunks.
2. Sauté the jalapeno and onion until your kitchen smells amazing. If you want to keep it mild for cats and children and spice, remove the seeds from the jalapeno before you mince it.
3. Add everything else and simmer it for 20-30 minutes. I usually simmer it for 20 minutes and then reduce the heat and let it cook for another half hour on low, so the flavors integrate better. It’s fully cooked quickly when you mince it, but you want the flavors to really meld as the cell walls in the veggie and fruits break down.
4. Top it with tortilla strips and whatever else you want. More onion and cilantro can’t hurt, and most people throw cheese and avocado in there.

Nutrition Information

The nutrition varies with the addition of toppings, but here’s what I calculated using a bunch of tortilla chips as toppings.  Shit ended up basically isocaloric, which seems to be how I eat naturally when I’m not chugging protein shakes.

Servings: 8

• Calories: 310
• Carbohydrates: 27g
• Protein: 27g
• Fat: 11g
• Saturated Fat: 1g
• Fiber: 6g
• Sugar: 4g

And there you have it- a stew so fucking delicious and nutritious it would turn a cannibal away from their preferred meat source. A stew that could propel you to such heights as slitting a mans belly open before he’d realized he’d insulted you, making gunslingers look like the slow, impersonal pussies they are; or getting jacked as fuck and doing high-flier lucha libre moves while weighing 220 pounds of mullet-topped muscle; or go from bar brawling dickhead from Huntington Beach into the UFC Light Heavyweight Champion. It’s a stew with a serious pedigree of badassery, so respect that shit and bang those fucking weights- I don’t call them stewroids for nothing.

SUPPORT THE STRENGTH SPORTS UNDERGROUND AND A ROGUE ACADEMIC HELL BENT ON FORCIBLY EDUCATING EVERY PERSON WHO’S EVER LOOKED ASKANCE AT A BARBELL.

Sources:

Chouinard, Maxime.  Divers foul tricks and stratagems: Mexican and Bowie knife fighting.  HEMA Misfits.  17 Aug 2014.  Web.  20 Jan 2021.  https://hemamisfits.com/2014/08/17/divers-foul-tricks-and-stratagems-mexican-and-bowie-knife-fighting/

Gershon, Livia.  In Mexico, archaeologists reveal a story of cannibalism and conquest.  Smithsonian.  21 Jan 2021.  Web.  21 Jan 2021.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mexican-archaeologists-reveal-story-cannibalism-and-conquest-180976805/

Liked it? Take a second to support Jamie Chaos on Patreon!