Dorilocos - Gastro Obscura

Prepared Foods

Dorilocos

At last, a street snack that brings together Doritos, veggies, pickled pig skin, and gummies.

Walking through Mexico City’s Bosque de Chapultepec, one of the largest city parks in the Western Hemisphere, you’ll see many vendors with hand-painted signs advertising Dorilocos (“crazy Doritos”), a relatively new Mexican street treat.

A snack of Dorilocos is composed of Doritos (typically the nacho cheese variety, but any flavor will do), chopped vegetables (carrots, celery, cucumber, and sometimes jicama, beet, or whatever’s available), cueritos (pickled pig skin), Japanese-style peanuts (coated in wheat flour and soy sauce, then fried until crunchy), hot sauce (the puya chili–based Valentina seems standard), chamoy (a sweet-sour condiment made from pickled fruit), and a generous squirt of lime. Oh, and gummies.

That’s right: gummies.

Beyond the basic ingredients (Doritos, hot sauce, and chamoy seem fundamental), the recipe is open to interpretation. Some vendors add a chili-sugar powder, such as Tajin or Miguelito. Others add some mild Mexican cheese. Jalapeños? Why not?

After the customer chooses the kind of Doritos he or she prefers, the vendor snips one side of the Doritos bag. Many Dorilocos vendors cut the Doritos bag along one of the long sides to widen the serving area and make it easier to mix everything together. To ensure a clean cut, they snip off both triangular corners of the bag and then cut straight between them. Everything goes into the bag, and it all gets mixed together as the vendor jostles and jumbles the contents.

A plastic fork is dispensed with each order of Dorilocos, which are served in the Doritos bag itself. Using the bag as an eating vessel is in line with the fine tradition of the “Walking Taco.” With that dish, also called a Frito Pie, taco ingredients are piled into a bag of Fritos for a very manageable, moveable feast.

Also available in Chapultepec are papaslocas (made with potato chips) and Tostilocos (made with Tostitos tortilla chips). One interesting thing about papaslocas is that they’re often prepared in tall plastic cups, so you can see the contents. Each order of papaslocas gets dressed with a tamarind paste–coated plastic straw, upon which a few gummy rings are impaled.

Dorilocos, papaslocas and Tostilocos are beautiful expressions of street food’s fun spirit, many times characterized by experimentation and slightly over-the-edge nuttiness. As with most street food scenes, there’s competition among vendors, and locals can choose their preparation based on the ingredients offered by specific vendors, the quantity of each serving, or whether they just happen to personally like one vendor over another.

Walking through Chapultepec, you’ll encounter a dazzling array of colorful snacks. Dorilocos appeal because of their craziness but also because they’re tasty. The fried crunch of the Doritos syncs up with the fresh crunch of the vegetables, the sourness of the pickled pig skin and chamoy sing to each other, the Japanese-style peanuts and the gummies offer textural dimension, and all the flavors are held in place by the Valentina hot sauce.

No one knows exactly who came up with this concoction, or why, but as Dorilocos contain ingredients that are easily found at the average Chapultepec snack cart, it was probably just a matter of time.

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Written By
David Hammond David Hammond