#CHICKEN PASTOR TACO RECIPE PROFESSIONAL#

“The food I love eating the most, whether it’s at a restaurant or somebody’s house, or from a cookbook, I want to taste the cook,” Martinez explains. Everywhere he went, instead of ordering the most popular dish, he would ask chefs across Mexico about their favorite dish to make and serve.

#CHICKEN PASTOR TACO RECIPE PROFESSIONAL#

Each page and subsequent recipe is a new and delicious recipe, certain to satisfy the hunger for any reader with a pang of wanderlust.Īlthough Martinez-who is a former senior food editor at Bon Appetit and hosts food and travel show Pruébalo for Babish Culinary Universe-has had professional culinary training and a wealth of knowledge when it comes to cooking, he devoted his time in Mexico as a space for learning. The regionality of Mexican cuisine is the backbone of Mi Cocina, and Martinez jumps from the winding oceanside cliffs of Oaxaca where he eats whole fish on the beach, to the mountainous rainforests of Veracruz complete with indigenous white mole thickened with masa. “I wanted to do that same thing for Mexican cuisine because there is such a diverse culture and geography and climate, and that obviously impacted the food.” was just red sauce-but then you started getting authors that were exploring Italian cuisine from a regional perspective and all of a sudden we had a language to start talking about Tuscan cuisine and Sicilian and Northern Italian,” Martinez says. So how could Martinez make an “authentic” cookbook? For starters, he ditched the buzz words, and instead decided to be wholeheartedly himself-sharing the actual food, experiences, and stories he came across during his 586 days traveling across the different regions of Mexico. But the reality is, having lived in Mexico now for almost three years, if I invited 10 people to my house and I all told ’em to bring the same dish, there would be 10 wildly different versions of each of those dishes.”Īnd none of those versions would be wrong or inauthentic-just different. “The way that these books by people of color about non-white American food are sold is by this idea of it being a hyper authentic, genuine representation of that country.

“Authenticity is a very American construct and what I believe to be the intersection of marketing and real racism,” Martinez explains. He marketed the book as “simple” and “modern” and even contended with a dreaded word in the recipe development world: “authentic.”īut trying to subscribe to this type of cookbook felt false and meaningless to him. There would undoubtedly be tacos and enchiladas, the kinds of recipes he has developed over and over again throughout his career in food media-the recipes that American readers come to expect from a Mexican chef, with their limited understanding of the country. When Rick Martinez first wrote the proposal for Mi Cocina, his debut cookbook, he knew he wanted to travel all over Mexico and share recipes from his adventures.

Chicken pastor taco recipe