MARKETS : A <i> Supermercado </i> in Santa Ana

Top Valu Market No. 8, 1120 S. Bristol St., Santa Ana, (714) 957- 2529. Open 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.

BRRrrrsptHummmmphfftzzzit . A loud speaker crackles on and a deep voice blares in Spanish: “ Te informamos hoy en el produce: jicama, solamente tres libras por sesenta y ocho centavos; frijoles de Springfield, una libra por ochenta y cinco centavos; Charmin . . . “

Here at Top Valu Market No. 8 in Santa Ana, daily specials blurb over the P.A. system in Spanish and English, interrupting a near-constant stream of American oldies hits. In front of the store, kids ride the emerald-green horse or the orange-colored Dumbo elephant on a miniature carousel. Just inside the door you’ll see a churro stand, a video rental boutique with lots of Cantinflas movies and dubbed Disney cartoons, and magazine racks packed with Spanish-language versions of Elle and Cosmopolitan.

Top Valu No. 8 is well stocked with standard American products, but somehow it still conveys the spirit of a Mexican marketplace. Concessionaires lining the store’s inside perimeter sell sombreros, Western boots with metal-tipped toes and sacos , those Mexican-style men’s short suit jackets. Multihued pinatas dangle over the vegetable bins, and the meaty aroma of frying carnitas mingles with the warm smell of baking Mexican rolls wafting from the hot deli area.

Most of the Mexican produce at Top Valu--jicama, chayotes, plantains and mangos--is getting to be pretty familiar everywhere. But here it’s featured in mountainous heaps. And occasionally Top Valu No. 8 will have something exceptional like a pile of gleaming orange habanero chiles or the hard-to-find fresh epazote , an herb essential to west-central and southern Mexican cooking.

“About 90% of our customers are Hispanic,” says the store’s manager, Ben Hashemi, after I ask him about the imported canned Guatemalan black beans and the Mexican Penafiel and Jarrito sodas. “We get these things to make our customers feel at home.”

Of all Top Valu’s nine stores, No. 8 is the most likely to make hard-core Mexican cooks feel at home. In its Mexican-style full-service butcher department you can get carne asada or milanesa (or for that matter any meat you want) cut to order; shrink-wrapped meats are still not entirely customary in Mexico. The butchers here also make hot and mild chorizo and an intense russet-colored carne adobada , marinated in achiote and orange juice. Over in the dairy section you can get Mexican-style cheeses in plastic-wrapped packages, supermarket-style, but here at the meat counter, the butcher will cut cheese to your order, slicing off a slab of queso fresco , aged cotija or stringy Oaxaca straight from huge wheels of cheese.

“Of all our stores this one is closest to the border, so we wanted it to have that authentic feel,” says John Cordero, Top Valu’s grocery director.

Ironically, the head of the Top Valu chain, Darioush Khaledi, comes from Iranian Kurdistan.

“When I moved here in 1976, I was looking for a business to buy because I needed to make a living,” Khaledi says. It could have been any kind of business, a transmission shop or a gas station. After analyzing many possibilities, a small supermarket in Torrance proved the most promising.”

Today the former civil engineer and political prisoner (he was jailed in Tehran for his association with Amnesty International and his opposition to the Shah’s dictatorship) has been called an industry leader in the field of independent Latino grocers. He’s also been called prophetic for his foresight into the untapped potential of the lucrative Latino market, a sector that has expanded exponentially over the past decade.

And after 17 years, K.V. Mart Co., which Khaledi co-owns with his brother-in-law, Parviz Vazin, includes nine supermarkets, four moderate-sized warehouse-style stores (with more on the drawing boards) and five shopping centers.

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When Khaledi and Vazin first acquired their store in Torrance they let their employees continue to run the business. “I had no idea what I was going to do when we first opened and they were making money,” Khaledi says. At that time he was unfamiliar with grocery industry management protocol. Terms such as “target marketing,” and “demographics of spending power,” so popular with marketing experts today, were foreign to him. In fact, English was pretty foreign to him, too. “I could barely speak it,” he admits.

But Khaledi began his own brand of back-yard market research--he simply observed the store’s clientele. “We had a lot of Spanish-speaking customers but almost none of the employees spoke Spanish,” he explains. Sensing that he could build customer loyalty by catering more directly to this clientele, he began hiring bilingual cashiers and asking their advice on what merchandise to stock.

K.V. Mart’s second store in Lennox was even more precisely geared to Hispanic customers. The market maintained a full service butcher who could cut meats in the Latin American fashion and it stocked plenty of variety meats. Many Central American and Mexican customers feel comfortable shopping where they know the owner or are familiar with the employees, so Khaledi encouraged his bilingual staff to try to remember customers’ names. Soon he began to call his markets “Friendly Neighborhood Stores” in advertisements.

He used the same strategies for the rest of the stores in the company’s expanding empire. Cashiers were also encouraged to relay customer requests to the manager, who in turn had the authority to order independently of any centralized ordering system. Each Top Valu could then closely tailor specialty merchandise to its neighborhood, whatever the population mix. The Long Beach branch on Cherry Avenue and the Compton and Lawndale stores, for example, stock a section of Southern items, including instant Creole roux and gravy mix, hot pickled okra, collard greens and fat back.

Shopping List

HERBS AND CONDIMENTS

* Camaron Molido: Along the costal areas of Mexico, fishermen dry shrimp to preserve them. These are often used ground, and now they even come in plastic shaker-top jars. During Vigilias (Lent), dishes based on dried shrimp replace meat and fresh fish. The most famous of these, tortas de camaron , is an assault on the senses that demonstrates the complex character of true Mexican cooking. The tortas are little deep-fried puffy omelets made with separately beaten egg whites and yolks and ground shrimp folded in. The rich mole that always sauces them calls for the flesh of several kinds of dried chiles and strips of fresh nopales (cactus paddles, which you can find in the produce section, whole or in bags, diced and ready to use).

* Fresh Epazote: As basic as it is to cooking in Mexico, this herb has been elusive in California, possibly because some cooks grow the self-propagating weed-like plant at home (with a taste slightly different from the epazote grown in Mexico). Epazote is now starting to show up in a few restaurants but only spottily in markets. Top Valu’s Santa Ana store is the first place I’ve seen it on a regular basis in a supermarket.

This sharp-tasting herb--a cross between thyme and lemon, plus a mysterious something else--is indispensable with fish, and it punches up the flavor of crab like nothing else.

In south and central Mexico, epazote is regarded as necessary in bean dishes, and also turns up in salsas and even huevos rancheros . It is rarely used dried except for medicinal purposes.

* Pico de Gallo Seasoning: Aptly named “rooster beak” for its sensory impact, pico de gallo seasoning is a blend of several kinds of ground chiles and salt. You see jars of it on the counters at the fruit stands on street corners and at Mexican swap meets. People sprinkle it over cucumber or green mango slices or onto jicama and even oranges. The brand found at Top Valu includes a recipe for pico de gallo salad in which the above-mentioned fruits and vegetables are tossed with the seasoning and fresh lime juice.

* Achiote Paste and Powder: Among Mexico’s first convenience foods were recados , spice pastes that women sold in the marketplaces. The recado based on annatto has become the most popular because soaking and crushing the tiny, rock-hard annatto seeds that go into it is an arduous task. A deep-brick-colored paste of the crushed seeds, garlic and other seasonings is pressed into solid 100-gram blocks called pasta de achiote condimentado ( achiote for short).

Achiote paste is most frequently blended with jugo de naranja agria , the juice of sour Seville oranges (if these are out of season, a blend of fresh orange and lemon juices substitutes fairly well). The marinade is smeared in a thick mass over roasts, sides of pork or chickens before the food is wrapped in banana leaves. Originally the leafy packets were cooked in an outdoor charcoal-heated pit oven, but broiling and barbecuing (with or without the banana leaf wrapping) are excellent alternatives.

Achiote paste is most often found in the Mayan cooking of Yucatan, Guatemala or Belize. Cuban cooks prefer their achiote in the form of bijol , powdered annatto mixed with cornstarch that comes in a tiny can the size of a walnut-half. Its most popular use is in Cuban yellow rice dishes where it takes the place of expensive saffron. A pinch of bijol may simply be added to the rice cooking liquid.

* Green Mole: There are hundreds of mole variations; most of them require lengthy cooking and complex ingredients. Many moles contain several kinds of chiles and crushed nuts and seeds.

I’m not going to tell you that a pre-made mole can compete with home cooking, but in a pinch it can make the same old chicken breasts or cubed pork taste pretty terrific. You find green mole packed in jars in the Mexican food aisle. Unfortunately, the directions for using it are sketchy. The instructions tell you simply to dilute the mole with broth and pour it over meat or chicken. I prefer to chop about 1/4 cup white onion per person and saute lightly until tender, then add meat chunks or chicken breasts to brown slightly. Next dilute the mole to a sauce-like consistency and add to the pan (it will thicken slightly, so have extra broth on hand to thin the sauce). Simmer the mole , covered, until the meat is tender. Near the end of cooking time, add a handful of chopped cilantro. I like to make double portions of this because it can be eaten with rice or used in a burrito or a soft taco, and it’s even better reheated.

HOT DELI

* Prepared Dishes: Top Valu’s in-house cooks turn out a small selection of home-style dishes every day. They may have chile colorado, pork chile verde or chilaquiles , sort of Mexican lasagna made from tortillas cooked with tomato salsa, then blanketed with cheese. There are also Salvadoran pupusas , savory pollos rotizados and sweet tamales for breakfast.

* Carnitas: Carnitas, crisp chunks of fried pork, are well-known taco-stand fare. Less well known are the pork meats traditionally cooked carnitas-style, namely snouts ( trompas ), ears ( orejas ) and buche (part of the intestine). Each has its own special texture that devotees prize. I prefer the meaty, slightly chewy trompas cut into slivers and eaten with good salsa in a taco.

* Baked Goods: Baked on the premises are the baseball-mitt-shaped teleras , rolls used for tortas , Mexican-style submarine sandwiches. Bolillos, Mexican-style French rolls, issue from the same oven. There’s also a small, uninspired selection of pan dulce .

DAIRY FOODS

* Jocoque: Like crema Mexicana , jocoque is a cultured cream. But its particular culture gives it the more pronounced flavor of fresh cheese. Jocoque , in fact, is very similar to mascarpone but with a saltier taste. Like crema , it tops fruit salads, tacos, gorditas or chiles rellenos. One jocoque label even suggests putting it on a baked potato. Several brands of jocoque are available. My favorite contains no gelatin, vegetable gums or other fillers.

* Requeson: Basically, this is ricotta, a soft, unripened and only slightly drained cheese. When you buy the bulk-packed requeson from the butcher case, it is wonderfully creamy and especially nice with berries or sliced ripe mangos. Some like requeson with slices of gelled Latin American fruit paste, usually guava or quince (found around the corner from the hot deli). If drained until quite dry, requeson can be transformed into a scrambled-egg-style dish folded into a sauteed mixture of onions, tomatoes and chiles and served with tortillas.

* Oaxaca Cheese: This mild, slightly chewy eating cheese is a near relative of mozzarella and a close cousin to Middle Eastern string cheese. You’ll find huge balls of it, looking like balls of yarn, in the butcher’s case along with the other bulk cheeses; in the cheese department, small Oaxaca cheese balls are individually packed in plastic.

PRODUCE

* Jamaica: Agua de jamaica , a staple at almost every authentic Mexican food stand, is the ruby-red drink made by steeping hibiscus flowers (actually the dried flower bud coverings) in water. It’s never as good, though, as the more intensely flavored drink you can make at home as easily as you brew tea. Look for jamaica in bulk near the dried chiles.

My recipe for agua de jamaica is simply to bring five cups of water to boil, then stir in 3/4 cup dried jamaica and remove the mixture from the heat. Cover and steep about 10 minutes. Add 1/2 cup of superfine granulated sugar, stirring very well. Allow the brew to cool in the pot, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar. Next strain the brew into glass jars or bottles and chill well. Discard the flowers. Serve the agua with plenty of ice. If the infusion is a bit strong, add a little extra water.

CHILES

Some chiles, like the small green serrano or the medium-sized hot jalapeno, are fairly standardized across the country. But selecting certain chiles for a particular recipe can be a confusing task even when chiles are labeled. This is because poblano chiles, which go by the name of ancho chiles when dried, are often mistakenly called fresh pasilla chiles in California and in Michoacan, a state from which many Mexicans have emigrated. Chiles anchos may have other names, among them pasilla and chile colorado , depending on whom you ask and where your chile expert comes from.

However, when real pasilla chiles are called for in Mexican cookbooks, they must be the dried version of chiles chilacas . These true pasillas are easy to tell apart from ancho/pasillas because they are long, skinny and wrinkly rather than short and stubby. But beware: Pasillas can also be called chiles negros .

There are good books to help dispel the confusion; in the meantime, this quick guide may help:

* Chiles Poblanos: These fist-size, fresh dark-green chiles are popular for chiles rellenos or as rajas , chile slices either cooked in cream with cheese or used as a garnish. Poblanos are usually quite mild. They are extremely mild if you remove all the seeds and veins (wear latex gloves to do this). They’re also good for stuffing.

* Anaheim Chiles: Also termed chile verde or chile verde del norte , these are long, two-inch wide mild peppers.

* Chiles Anchos: One of the most widely used peppers in Mexican cooking, these wrinkly, wide chiles are a dark, almost black, burgundy color. They look almost exactly like the peppers called mulato chiles. Anchos have a fruity, some say prune-like taste. You can be sure an ancho is an ancho and not a mulato by holding it to the light; the ancho will be more translucent. (Remember, anchos are often called pasillas in California.)

* Chiles Pasillas: Another popular dried chile, often used in combination with others, pasillas stand out from other long, thin dried chiles because they are the darkest colored and most wrinkly of all. Pasillas have a deep, complex, toasty flavor with a tart edge.

MISCELLANEOUS

* Cajeta: Sweetened, caramelized milk, cajeta is the Mexican equivalent of peanut butter and jelly. Originally it was made without sugar from goat’s milk and packaged in small wooden cajas (boxes), from which the dessert gets its name. Now cow’s milk cajeta in jars is more or less standard--at least in urban Mexico. Cooks spread this golden, fudgy substance between layers of cake, or they fill crepes with it and sprinkle them with toasted pecans. The most baroque cajeta cake I’ve ever seen was a cake roll filled with ice cream and melted chocolate and covered with a cajeta sauce spread over the outside under a coating of nuts--a sort of upgrade of the banana split.

Cajeta has been borrowed from the dessert pantry for the everyday table. People serve a little dollop of it with queso fresco for a quick dessert. They drizzle it on waffles or make a quick snack by spreading it on crackers or toasted sandwich bread. Like peanut butter, cajeta is also good spooned straight from the jar.

* Horchata: The numerous cereal-based drinks still scarcely known north of the Rio Grande are basic to everyday Mexican eating. Champurrado is a hot chocolate thickened with corn masa . Atoles are corn- or rice- or barley-based drinks that make nourishing breakfasts or between-meal snacks. One of the most prevalent grain-based refrescos , horchata, is a chilled, rice- and cinnamon-based drink that tastes like rice pudding in a glass. An instant version sold in paper envelopes eliminates the need for grinding all that soaked rice and makes it easy to prepare one serving at a time. It even makes very low-fat milk taste good.