The Agave Garden & Roasting Pit

In the middle of the Agave Garden, hands-on ethnobotanist Jesús García built a small roasting pit fashioned after the agave-baking ovens typically employed for the clandestine production of bootleg mescal distillate—often called Bacanora—in northern Sonora, Mexico. The rock-lined pit is brought to a very high temperature and then sealed to bake agave for several days. The pits of indigenous farmers who roasted agave for food and fiber were much larger; many hands were needed to seal and uncover the pit, and many agave hearts could be roasted at once. Our pit is ideal for demonstration and educational purposes, as it can be managed by a single person. The pit can also be used for roasting corn, and other foods.

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“This is a Sonoran-style agave roasting pit. It’s a conical hole in the ground lined with rocks, about two and a half feet deep, two and a half feet wide at the bottom, and about two feet wide at the top. In the hole, you put a lot of fire, a lot of wood, for a long time, to heat up the rocks. And then you throw in the agave heads or cabezas de maguey, and cover them, bury them, and wait for two or three days. When you uncover it, you have cooked agave. That is the traditional way that many people in Sonora continue to roast agave, particularly for the making of spirits, also known as Bacanora, a kind of traditional drink of Sonora.”

“I come from the town of Magdalena, Sonora, but my father grew up in Baviacora, Sonora, which is on the Rio Sonora in Mexico. All my life I grew up hearing that my father was a mescalero. As a young man, he would go up in the mountains with his uncle. They went with donkeys or horses to harvest agave, process it and then take it to a hidden place, because at that time, they had to be careful of the police, the rural police called the acordada. If they got caught, they would either be put in jail, or even killed. So it was a very dangerous activity at that time. When you have the agave, you make a roasting pit and roast the agave. Afterwards you mush it up, ferment it, and distill it. Then you have Bacanora. The Bacanora was brought down from the mountains, at night, and then it was sold to the public. Apparently, that was the job of my grandmother, to sell the spirits to the locals. Hearing all these stories, my brothers and I always kept saying, oh, someday we should try to make mescal, try to make Bacanora the way our father did, because we have known the entire process, but all in stories. So when we had the opportunity here at the Mission Garden to interpret the way agave was roasted traditionally, I was happy to be able to do it.”

“At the same time, I learned that agave roasting is not just a tradition of mestizo Mexicans. As I started learning history and anthropology, I learned that the indigenous people, the people who have lived here in this region for thousands of years, have always done the same thing. Agave has been a very crucial crop for the livelihood of local peoples. There's plenty of evidence of this in archaeological sites in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado, especially in the lower deserts here. Traditionally, people dug a big huge hole, and we're talking a hole that could be ten feet wide, and five to eight feet deep, like a large bowl in the ground. They lined these holes with rocks. In Mexico some people still do that, particularly in the southern part of Mexico. That is the traditional way that it’s done.”

“Here, in the north, very few people roast in the large pits nowadays. In Sonora people refer to those open mouth roasting pits as mallas whereas the smaller roasting pits with narrow mouths are called hornos. That’s just a difference in vocabulary for local mescaleros. The horno is a little more efficient, and easier to work with. So when we had the opportunity to make this agave roasting pit at Mission Garden, I decided to go for the Sonoran-style. Not only was it easier to build, but also it is more efficient in terms of education, to teach people how it works. One or two people can manage it very easily. The Native American-style that has been documented here in this region, the style still used in southern Mexico, the bowl style, takes a lot of work, a lot of wood, a lot of materials and dirt and many people to cover it. You have to dig another hole around the sides to cover it. So it's a very, very elaborate process. It takes a long, long, long time. So that was the reason we didn't go for that Native American style.”

“This oven, as you see it here, is more practical for demonstration and educational purposes. We’ve had a few issues with the airflow, but basically you want to get all the rocks very, very hot, until they're white. Sometimes you even have to heat extra rocks, depending on the amount of agave heads or piñas that you have to roast. For the last six years now we've been roasting every year and sometimes we have a good outcome sometimes we don't depending on how much fire we have, the amount of rocks that we're heating. But essentially, we have gotten as far as roasting several agaves. We are narrowing down the ideas of what species to roast, at what stage, because all those things are important to get a good quality product when it's been roasted. And we are still working on that.”