Colombia has had a very good couple of years.
Terrón Panela went viral, ClayTok found the mountain videos, and suddenly everyone wanted Colombian dirt. I'm not complaining. It brought a lot of lovely people into this community who'd previously thought they were the only person in the world who liked the smell of a plant pot.
But while all that was happening, Mexico was quietly sitting there having done this for roughly four hundred years longer than anyone on TikTok.
Mexican clay is, to me, the most varied thing in the whole catalogue. You get snow-white kaolins that melt like cold cream. You get raw, gritty lumps of hillside. You get fired terracotta pots that snap like a biscuit. Three completely different experiences, all from the same country, and most people only ever try one of them.
So here's the proper version.
First, the words
A bit of vocabulary makes the whole category click into place, and it also stops you buying the wrong thing.
Barro is the general Spanish word for clay or mud. In practice, in this community, it almost always means fired terracotta: pots, plates, figures, bricks. Warm orange, iron-rich, snappy.
Terrón means a clod or a lump. A terrón is raw earth, dug and dried rather than fired and shaped. This is where the dirt-forward flavours live.
Caolín is kaolin, the soft white china clay. Mexico has a lot of it, and Mexican kaolin tends to be creamier and less squeaky than some of the African and Indian kaolins people cut their teeth on.
Cantarito is a little clay jug. Jarrito is a little clay cup. Platito is a little clay plate. You'll see all three sold broken into pieces, and the difference between them is mostly thickness and how loud the snap is.
That's it. That's the whole glossary. Everything else is variations on those four.
Mexico has been eating clay for a very long time
This is the bit I find genuinely fascinating, and it's a lot better documented than most people assume.
The búcaros, or: how Mexican clay became a European luxury habit
In the 17th century, potters around Tonalá in Jalisco were making burnished red earthenware vessels called búcaros de Indias. They were unglazed, so they worked as evaporative coolers, and the clay gave the water inside a distinctive scent and taste. They were shipped to Spain in enormous numbers and treated as serious luxury objects.
And then the Spanish and Italian aristocracy started eating them.
Not metaphorically. Fragments that had broken in transit were eaten as they were, or ground down and mixed into water. It was mostly women, it was widespread enough to be a running joke, and the claimed benefits were the usual mix of digestive, medicinal and cosmetic. The Victoria and Albert Museum's write-up notes contemporary claims that the clay helped with stomach and skin complaints, menstrual symptoms, and even worked as a contraceptive. It didn't, to be clear.
The practice had a name, bucarofagia, and it was mainstream enough that Lope de Vega was taking the mickey out of it on stage by 1608: "Girl of broken colour, either you have lovers, or you eat clay." Velázquez painted a búcaro being handed to the Infanta in Las Meninas. It turns up in still lifes next to imported porcelain, which tells you exactly how expensive it was.
So the next time someone tells you eating clay is a weird modern internet thing, you're allowed to mention that it was a status symbol in the Spanish court while they were painting Las Meninas.
The holy earths
The other strand is religious, and it's still going.
At San Juan de los Lagos in Jalisco and at Chalma in the State of Mexico, pilgrims buy small pressed blocks of local earth, sold as tierrita or tierra santa. They're roughly 3cm by 5cm, sandy and porous, and they're sold through herbalists and devotional shops as much as at the shrines themselves. People eat them as an act of faith, and the folk claims attached to them run from digestion in pregnancy to bone strength in older people.
The local legend at San Juan is that the Virgin appeared as a girl on the hillside, playing with the clay and rolling it into little balls. That's where the soil's reputation comes from.
I'll be straight with you about this one, because I think it matters more here than anywhere else in this article: earth collected and pressed at a pilgrimage site is not quality-controlled, and Mexican reporting on the tierrita trade has raised arsenic and lead specifically. That's not me being sniffy about the tradition. It's a genuinely beautiful piece of living heritage. It's just also earth, from a hillside, sold by whoever is selling it that day.
And then there's just... normal life
Underneath the museum history and the shrine history, there's the ordinary bit. Clay pots have been used across Mexico for water, cooking and serving for thousands of years, and unglazed barro flavours whatever's inside it. A cantarito cocktail in Jalisco is served in a clay cup precisely because the cup changes the drink.
Once a whole culture is drinking out of earth on purpose, eating a bit of it isn't the leap people think it is.
The three families, and what they actually feel like
Mexican kaolins
If you've only ever had African kaolin, Mexican caolín will surprise you. It's generally softer, creamier and less aggressively squeaky, and the Mexican sellers do interesting things with it rather than just bagging it raw.
Caolín Humo is smoked. Deep grey to charcoal, irregular chunks, and it tastes of wood smoke and wet concrete over a soft chalk base. The crunch is gentle and crisp, then it turns silky and creamy with almost no grit. It's the one I'd hand to someone who says kaolin is boring.
Caolín Crema de Coco is snow-white, firm on the first bite, and goes thick and creamy rather than melting away. There’s a coconut-ish sweetness sitting under a faintly smoky earthiness. Genuinely rich, for a rock.
Caolín Cremino is the gentle one. Pale stone colour, a light clean crunch, then it dissolves into something closer to milk than mud. Petrichor and wet concrete on the nose. If you're melt-focused rather than crunch-focused, start here.
Mexican Kaolin is the plain version, and there's nothing wrong with plain. Firm chalky bite, silky fine paste, mild soil-and-chalk flavour, no grit and no stickiness.
Mexican Holy Bars are the Tierrita de San Juan de los Lagos I mentioned above, white, soft, powdery, with a rainwater freshness and a proper damp-basement aroma once they're moistened. Sold as a piece of living tradition, and described here as exactly that rather than as anything more.
Terrones
This is raw Mexico. Dug, dried, not fired, not tidied up.
Terrón Chalma is the intense one. Medium-to-hard, breaks into sharp powdery shards rather than melting, and it goes deep earthy and dusty with wet concrete, cement and metallic notes. Some batches come through with a faint soapy edge, which is a real characteristic of the material rather than a fault. There's no creamy payoff here. That's the point of it.
Regio-Style Clay Croutons, or terrones crotones regios, are a blend of tepetate and adobe, the same materials Mexico has been building with for centuries. Soft dusty bite, quick collapse into a rich muddy paste, and it tastes like rain landing on dry ground. Non-sticky, manageable grit, and much gentler than Chalma.
Mexican Emerald Clay (esmeralda arcilla) is the odd one out, a muted green clay with a firm bite that goes smooth and cement-like rather than gritty. Top-soil flavour, quite dense, and it gets smoother if you moisten it slightly.
Cantaritos, jarritos and the rest of the fired barro
Fired terracotta is a different discipline entirely. Kaolin melts. Terrón crumbles. Barro snaps.
Cantarito clay pots are thin-walled sun-dried and fired vessels, sold whole or as broken pieces. Medium-soft, gritty, sandy breakdown, desert-dry dirt and warm terracotta minerals. The thinness is what makes them, because you get that clean crack rather than a dull thud.
Mexican mini clay pots come in three stages of destruction and they're genuinely different products. Whole pots for the full snap, broken chips for something thinner and crispier that shatters into sandy crystal-like specks, and crumbs for when you want texture without commitment.
Broken platitos are fragments of mini plates, and they're bolder: medium-hard, scorched earthenware aroma, metallic tang, a faint cement finish. Worth knowing that broken pottery has edges, because it does.
Bolillos y Sol is the charming one. Little barro figures shaped as bread rolls, suns, turtles, shells and flowers, medium crunch with a powdery melt and a surprising floral note under the dirt.
Barro Wafer is a pressed terracotta disc with a firm snap and a soft chalky crumble, rich red earth with a hint of sweetness and an aroma of rain on dry soil. It's also the closest thing in the range to those 17th century búcaros, which is why I like it more than I probably should.
Cacahuates Japonés de Barro are tiny hand-moulded pebbles named after the Mexican snack they resemble. Soft dusty crunch, fine powdery melt, warm red-earth minerals.
Stock on Mexican lines moves around a lot, so some of the above will be in and out depending on when you're reading this. The product pages are the honest source, not me.
A word about Terrón Panela, since it always comes up
Terrón Panela is Colombian, not Mexican. I know. But it's the thing people ask me about most, and it's the reason a lot of you found this shop in the first place, so it's worth saying where it sits.
It's named after the blocks of unrefined cane sugar you'll find in most Colombian kitchens, purely because it looks like them. It isn't sweet. What it is, is the single most unpredictable clay I stock: dry and sandy in one piece, dense and damp in the next, occasionally collapsing into something thick and muddy with gritty mineral crunches hiding in it. Strong petrichor, a tangy finish, and no two handfuls the same.
I'm the only seller in Europe with it.
That isn't a marketing line I'm pleased with so much as a logistics fact I'm slightly amazed by. It comes from Miku Golosinas in Colombia, from Angie, the Mountain Girl whose videos started all of this. Direct, in small batches, packed fresh.
Which, honestly, is the whole argument for buying this sort of thing from a specialist rather than a marketplace listing. Not because I'm better than anyone. Because clay is a natural product that changes with storage, and I can tell you when a batch landed, who it came from and whether it was still a bit damp when I bagged it. If I don't know something, I'll say I don't know. If something is community-tested rather than tested by me, the product page says so.
That's the bit I actually care about. Everything else is just dirt in a bag, and there's plenty of that about.
If you're starting from scratch
Pick one from each family rather than three from one. A creamy kaolin, a raw terrón and a fired barro piece will teach you more about your own preferences in a week than a kilo of the same clay will in a year.
And take samples where they exist. There's no prize for buying 500g of something you turn out to hate.
Ta x
Disclaimer: This is written for informational and hobbyist purposes. My clay and chalk products are natural materials sold for sensory, hobbyist, collection and ASMR use only. They aren’t certified food-grade, and I don’t sell them as food, supplements or medicine. You’ll often see "edible clay" used as a search and community term across this space, including on my own site, but that doesn’t mean any product has been assessed or authorised as a food under UK law. Natural clays and earths vary in composition and can contain naturally occurring minerals and contaminants, and UK food safety guidance has raised this specifically in relation to geophagia. The historical and cultural claims described above are reported as history, not as health advice, and I make no health claims about anything I sell. Any consumption is entirely a personal decision and entirely at your own risk. I don’t promote ingestion and can’t be held responsible for any adverse effects. If you have concerns about pica or geophagia, please speak to a GP or another qualified healthcare professional.
Sources
● Victoria and Albert Museum, "Let them eat clay: Mexican búcaros": https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/let-them-eat-clay-mexican-bucaros-ceramics
● Wikipedia, "Búcaro de Indias": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BAcaro_de_Indias
● México Desconocido, "Descubre el secreto de la tierra santa comestible de Chalma y San Juan de los Lagos": https://www.mexicodesconocido.com.mx/tierra-santa-comestible.html
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