Americas Recipes

Mexican vs Tex-Mex is one of the most searched food questions on the internet, and most of the answers get it wrong in one of two directions. Either they dismiss Tex-Mex entirely as a fake, dumbed-down version of real Mexican food that serious cooks should ignore. Or they treat Mexican food and Tex-Mex as essentially the same thing with minor regional variations. Both positions are wrong. Both are disrespectful, to different things and different people. Here is the honest answer, as someone who has spent serious time learning both traditions and who cares about getting this right. This is part …

Learn more

Before deeping in mole negro recipe, I’m going to be straight with you about something. This recipe took me three years. Not three years of working on it every day, but three years of attempting it, failing, learning something, attempting again, getting closer, failing differently, learning something new, and slowly, slowly, building up the understanding that Dona Carmen had in her hands and her memory and her sixty years of making this dish every time someone in her community had a wedding or a baptism or a funeral or a reason to celebrate or mourn. She made it look effortless. …

Learn more

This corn tortillas recipe is the most important recipe in my entire Mexican collection. Not the most impressive, not the most dramatic, the most important. Here is why I say that. Corn tortillas have been a dietary staple in Mesoamerica for thousands of years, longer than most civilizations have existed, longer than wheat bread has been eaten in Europe, longer than almost any food tradition in the Western world. When you make corn tortillas from scratch, you are not just making a flatbread. You are participating in one of the oldest continuous food traditions on the planet. That might sound …

Learn more

This Mexican pantry guide exists because of a mistake I made early on. When I first started cooking Mexican food seriously, this was Nashville, 2022, fresh back from Oaxaca with four notebooks and a suitcase full of spice samples, I went to Kroger and tried to approximate what I needed from what was already on the shelves. Generic chili powder. Bell peppers standing in for poblanos. Regular cornmeal where masa harina should have been. The results were… look. They were fine. They were edible. They tasted vaguely Mexican the way that a postcard of Paris looks vaguely like being in …

Learn more

The best Mexican street food recipes I know came from standing on streets. Not from cookbooks. Not from restaurant menus. From sidewalks and market stalls and food carts and the particular kind of sensory overwhelm you get when you’re in a Mexican mercado at noon and there are twelve different things cooking simultaneously within ten feet of you and you have to make decisions quickly because everything smells extraordinary and you are very, very hungry. Mexico City has been ranked among the world’s greatest street food cities, and anyone who has eaten their way through a Mexican market knows exactly …

Learn more

Before deeping in the Mexican recipes, I need to tell you about Dona Carmen before we talk about anything else. She was, maybe, seventy-five years old. Maybe eighty. Nobody seemed entirely sure, including her. She lived in a house in Oaxaca with a kitchen that had been producing the same mole negro for longer than I have been alive, and when I sat down across from her at that table I felt, immediately and without question, that I was in the presence of someone who knew something I did not. She didn’t use a recipe. She didn’t use measuring spoons. …

Learn more