Migas in the morning
“Austin is long on music, migas and markets”—Molly Ivins
If you’ve ever had breakfast in Austin, chances are you’ve had a plate of migas. This dish of eggs scrambled with fried corn tortilla strips, salsa, and cheese is ubiquitous in some of the Texas capital city’s most popular breakfast spots.
I have fond memories of spending lazy mornings in bustling Austin cafés, scooping spoonfuls of the crunchy, cheesy eggs and bacon-laced refried beans into fluffy flour tortillas. There’s no better way to start the day.
I took a holiday from my office last week and subsequently decided to take a holiday from the Internet as well. Do you remember what life was like before we became beholden to the Interweb machine? I had forgotten, and it was satisfying spending most of my time in the real world.
Though I have to admit that not only did I upset my mom when I didn’t respond to an e-mail from her within 24 hours but I am also now woefully behind on correspondence with others. No matter, I haven’t felt this recharged in years!
One of the things I insisted on doing every morning was starting my day with a satisfying meal, the kind of food that normally I just don’t have the time to either make at home or linger over in a breakfast spot.
One of the things I craved was migas. You won’t find migas on menus here in New York City but there is something a bit similar, chilaquiles, which someone I know insists is just a fancy-pants way of saying migas. But I have to disagree.
There have been endless debates if chilaquiles and migas are the same thing. There’s no need to question this further: there is indeed a difference, however slight. Chilaquiles, which are also made with fried tortilla strips, traditionally are just the tortillas, salsa and cheese; you don’t need eggs for the dish to qualify as chilaquiles.
Furthermore, to make chilaquiles the salsa is added to the pan with the fried tortilla strips before anything else is added to the pan, whereas with migas the salsa is added at the end. Likewise, Tex-Mex migas are nothing without eggs; they don’t come any other way.
Then, to make things even more confusing, you have your Spanish migas, a dish I ate every Saturday morning when I spent time in Granada my junior year. The word migas in Spanish means “crumbs” and like Tex-Mex migas, Spanish migas are a way to use up something stale, in this case bread instead of corn tortillas. The bread is torn into pieces, soaked in water overnight and then cooked in chorizo fat and served with said sausage and fried eggs. A hearty way to start the day, much like Tex-Mex migas.
(Though the chorizo in the Spanish version is dried, whereas Mexican chorizo is fresh. There is a chilaquiles dish that makes a sauce with this sausage known as chilaquiles toluqueños, which is also worth learning more about.)
This dish is designed to use up your old stale tortillas, though if you only have fresh ones the end result will not suffer. You can use any kind of salsa you have on hand as well—migas taste just as good with a green salsa as with a red.
While cheese is pretty much a must, you can also jazz these up with crumbled Mexican chorizo, chopped poblanos, bacon, pico de gallo, onions or whatever else you have lying around. And that’s the beauty of migas—as long as you have your fried tortillas, eggs, cheese and salsas, you can add anything else you like.
How do you eat your migas?
Migas
Ingredients
- 8 large eggs
- 1/4 cup milk or half-and-half
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt pepper
- 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
- 1/3 cup peanut oil
- 4 corn tortillas cut into strips
- 1/2 medium yellow onion, diced
- 4 jalapeño peppers, seeded and diced
- 1 cup shredded Cheddar or Monterey Jack cheese
- 1 1/2 cups salsa, for topping
- 1/4 cup cilantro, for garnishing
- Refried beans, for serving
- Flour tortillas, for serving
Instructions
- In a bowl, whisk eggs together with milk. Stir in the salt and pepper.
- In a large iron skillet, heat up peanut oil on medium-high, and place tortilla strips into skillet, cooking for about 3 minutes, turning once. Remove the tortilla strips with a slotted spoon to a paper-towel-lined plate. Drain the oil from the skillet leaving 2 tablespoons in the skillet.
- Add the onions and jalapenos to the pan, and cook for a couple of minutes.
- Add the egg mixture and tortilla strips to the skillet and let eggs sit for about one minute or until set on the bottom and then gently stir. Sprinkle cheese on top of eggs and continue to cook until melted.
- Top eggs with salsa and cilantro. Serve hot with flour tortillas and refried beans.
Lisa – We're so full of salmon we started craving Tex-Mex. I whipped up some migas, wrote about them and gave a nod to you. Thanks, Charles
Linking up your Migas recipe over at Midchix to share with the Chix! I hope it brings you some Link LOve!
I am from Texas and I LOVE Migas!
I am making Kolaches today! Oh how I miss my sweet Czech Granny! By the way-I have relatives in West!
Another breakfast food in El Paso is green chicken enchiladas with Hatch Chilies and an egg fried and palced on top of everything.
Ken
I'm a Texan of Mexican descent and we routinely made migas at home. Though we never, ever, ever put cheese on them — whether this was because they traditionally don't have cheese on them or it's because my parents were accommodating my anti-cheese tastes is unknown. But we used to fry thinly sliced corn tortilla strips in vegetable oil until they were nice and crispy, add eggs and salsa, sprinkle on some salt, scramble, and serve.
I've also added thin strips of salami and finely diced onion to my migas (fried just after the tortilla strips get crispy), but even now that I've overcome my anti-cheese bias, I still cannot imagine migas with cheese. To me, if you add cheese to migas it becomes chilaquiles.
BTW, I appreciate hearing that there are lots of Texas expats who get tortillas shipped to them. If I could have things my way, I'd love to live in London, but I'd have to have HEB's tortillas and a large shipment of serrano peppers coming in on a regular basis if that were the case. My homemade salsa recipe involves a ton of serranos and it is a thousand times better than anything you can get from a jar at a grocery store. And HEB's homestyle corn and flour tortillas are my absolute favorite store-bought tortillas.