The Nucú: Chiapas' Edible Ant Goes from Comal to Pizza

In Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the nucú is having a moment.

For anyone who grew up in the central valleys of Chiapas, nucú is not unusual. It is a fact of the kitchen, like salt or lime. The ant — harvested during the rainy season, toasted on a comal, ground into a paste or served whole — has been a protein source in the region for as long as anyone remembers. It is eaten in tacos, mixed into tamales, stirred into moles. It tastes like toasted sesame with a back note of smoke and a texture that is, depending on who you ask, either crunchy or chewy.

What is unusual is what the traditional cooks of Tuxtla are doing with it now.

They are putting it on pizza.

Molé de nucú over a wood-fired crust. Nucú tostadas with fresh cheese and salsa. Nucú-stuffed chiles. Nucú sopes. Nucú tacos — those are not new. But also nucú pizza. Nucú pasta. Nucú lasagna. A culinary tradition that has been practiced in private kitchens for generations is now being pushed into the open, remade for palates that did not grow up with it.

The cooks driving this are mostly women, mostly older, mostly from the same neighborhoods in Tuxtla where the markets are crowded and the kitchens are small. They are not trained chefs. They are home cooks who learned from their mothers. The innovation is not coming from a restaurant kitchen or a food lab — it is coming from women who looked at a traditional ingredient and asked, What else can this do?

The answer so far: a lot.

Nucú works on pizza because it has the same umami density as anchovies but without the salt. It works in lasagna because it holds its texture through baking. It works in mole because it has always worked in mole. The difference is that now the mole is being served to people who came for the pizza.

There is a market logic to this. Chiapas has been positioning its native ingredients for years — café orgánico, cacao, vanilla, chipilín, hoja santa. Nucú is the latest. But the interest from outside the state is not driven by tourism campaigns or government programs. It is driven by the women who decided that an ant could be more than a memory of childhood.

The nucú boom is not a boom yet. It is happening in a handful of kitchens in Tuxtla, one pizza at a time. But it is happening. And if the trajectory of other traditional Mexican ingredients is any guide, it will not stop.

The question is whether nucú will follow the path of the chapulín — a novelty item, a gimmick for tourists in Oaxaca — or the path of huitlacoche, which went from "corn fungus" to a legitimate ingredient in high-end Mexican cuisine.

The cooks of Tuxtla are betting on the latter.

They have good reason. The flavor is there. The versatility is there. The tradition behind it is deep and real. What is missing is distribution — the infrastructure to get nucú from the kitchens of Tuxtla to the markets of Mexico City and beyond.

That will change, or it will not. Either way, for now, there is a woman in Tuxtla making nucú pizza on a comal, and she is doing it because she loves the taste, and because someone has to show people that an ant can be as delicious as anything else.

That is enough. The outcome will shape how Mexico handles similar challenges in the future.