The flavor of freshly harvested huitlacoche—grey-blue in color—hits like biting into baby lettuces newly plucked from the soil: crunchy, lightly sweet, and full of water.
“Guey, this is the real deal!” Paco Aguilar tells me excitedly, tearing off a lobe to pop into my mouth at Carnal, his tiny restaurant in Highland Park. “And the best part is that it lasts at least a week or two in the refrigerator!” he says.
Aguilar gently pan-fries the huitlacoche kernels to mix them with bellybutton-shaped chochoyotes (masa dumplings) that he handmakes and serves with a mixture of hoja santa and other mushrooms. When cooked, huitlacoche transforms, developing wild flavors that range between sweet corn on the longest day of the year and intensely grilled portabella mushrooms.