Latin American

Refritos—refried beans—are one of the most common side dishes in Mexican and Southwestern restaurants. Finding a good rendition, though, is rare. Most places use flavorless canned beans for a base—already a poor start. And they don’t take the time to slowly cook and stir them to infuse the mixture with flavor and texture. The best refritos are made from beans cooked from scratch with many different seasonings so the beans absorb the flavors and the cooking liquid is intense and balanced. Here are two recipes for refritos. The first is for black beans cooked from a dried state, which takes several hours to prepare. The second requires just forty minutes and uses canned black beans that are already cooked as a base.

If you don’t have time to cook your beans for refritos, for a better base, buy a Mexican brand of canned black beans like La Casteño, which have more flavor, or the Ranch brand, which have been cooked with jalapeños.

Guacamole means “sauce made with avocado” and comes from Nahuatl, the pre-Columbian language still spoken in some parts of Mexico: guac—avocado—and mole—a sauce made of more than one chile or ingredient. The best guacamoles are prepared in a stone mortar or molcajete. The chiles and cilantro are ground with lime and salt, and the avocados and tomatoes are mashed in, layering the flavors and creating a coarser, more interesting texture.

Here is another great side dish for tacos. The beans have a smoky taste from the bacon and smoked salt that makes them a particularly good match for meaty, northern-style dishes featuring beef, lamb, or pork. These pintos are spicier than black beans because of the jalapeños, and you don’t need to cook them as long—just until they are soft. Serve them in bowls with their juices—a perfect addition to any barbecue menu. They’re also hearty enough to be served alone as a meal.

This is one of my favorite sauces—it’s simple, but often poorly executed. When it’s done right—the tomatoes and serranos blackened, the onion and garlic sautéed, the sauce gently fried with some cilantro and roasted poblanos—it’s a rustic, vivid, soulful sauce that goes great with eggs, chicken, pork, tamales, and seafood.

Plantains are cooked at all stages of ripeness, but for this recipe, they should be bought and used green for ease in slicing and frying. These chips are great for buffets and go well with tacos with seafood fillings.

This sauce is offered at most taco stands throughout Mexico and is probably the one most widely served with tacos. Chile de árbol—literally “treelike”—is searingly hot, with a smoky, grassy flavor, but its heat is tamed slightly in this recipe by the tomatoes. A variation using serranos follows.

When you want a chile with distinctive flavor and a blast of heat for a salsa with Caribbean roots, the habanero is an obvious choice. It is native to the Caribbean basin, which includes the Yucatán region of Mexico. The flavor of habaneros has tropical overtones that perfectly complement fruit like mangoes and bananas. A little goes a long way—despite its diminutive size, it is the hottest of all chiles available in the United States and Mexico. This salsa makes a great condiment for pork, chicken, or fish.

Here is the recipe used at the Coyote Café. Along with chopped onions, fresh cilantro, salsa tomatillo, and red chile sauce, it’s always offered as a basic condiment with tacos, regardless of whatever special salsa is paired with a particular taco filling. Salsa fresca is used in Mexico like we use ketchup—to wake up plain foods. But salsa fresca is better than ketchup because it is made fresh—ripe tomatoes, a bit of onion for crunch, the heat of green chile, the tang of fresh lime juice, and the refreshing lift of aromatic cilantro.

Shake the small, dried medium-hot cascabel chile, and its seeds rattle (in Spanish, cascabel means rattle). Woodsy and smoky, it is a wonderful choice for this richly flavored salsa made with roasted tomatoes and garlic, toasted pumpkin seeds, and caramelized onion. Good with hearty meats from grilled beef to dark-fleshed game like buffalo.

Why make this versatile sauce yourself instead of buying it already prepared? You’ll get a smokier, more interesting result that’s free of additives and excess amounts of salt and vinegar of the commercial versions. It’s also a great base for other ingredients—tomatillos would be a flavorful addition. Use it in marinades, soups, as part of other sauces, or as a spicy table condiment at a taco party.

Bacon, red chile, and honey are a heavenly combination that I first tried in Santa Fe. I had found a really delectable red chile honey made in the Taos area of northern New Mexico. The combination of sweet, aromatic honey and earthy piquant red chile is a wonderful marriage that enhances both. You can make your own version: add a good fresh red chile powder or puree of fresh red chiles to a wild honey that isn’t too sweet. For these tacos, buy the best quality bacon you can find—it will make a huge difference in taste. For a more authentic Mexican flavor, you can substitute guava jam for the honey.

Spicy breakfast foods are the norm in Latin America or Asia, but not in the United States. I have always liked a spicy breakfast, finding that bland, starchy choices like bagels, toast, or pastries with sugar tend to make me sort of sleepy in the morning. This taco filling is another simple version of spicy scrambled eggs and would also make a great omelet when you don’t want tacos. Dry-roasting the jalapeños gives the dish a heady, smoky quality and cuts the richness of the eggs. A natural cream cheese would be another tasty accompaniment, with smoked salmon slices for garnish.

Chorizo was one of the first dishes that I learned to cook at home, prompted by a longing for it after visiting Mexico as a youth, where it was usually served for breakfast with eggs. No more dried, tough, salty bacon for me. I was a chorizo convert, and I was determined to have it for breakfast. While there were good local Mexican markets at the time, I found a simple recipe for chorizo in a Mexican cookbook of my mother’s (which I still have almost fifty years later). That homemade chorizo became our Sunday morning ritual. I measured out all the spices—the chile powders, the canela, the cumin, and other seasonings—and added them to the pan along with fresh ground pork. I stirred the mixture slowly, keeping it moist, until it was ready. Breakfast had become exciting again! For this filling, I prefer chorizo that has not been ground too fine and with plenty of fat. You can add additional spices and seasonings like red chile powder or roasted fresh green jalapeños to it while cooking to enhance or alter flavors.

In Mexico, slow-cooked meats like this are sometimes first wrapped in maguey leaves (from the maguey cactus), which are not available here. In this recipe, the rabbit is braised in aluminum foil with the fresh green aromatics of cilantro and mint, the earthiness of garlic, the tartness of tomatillos, and the heat of jalapeños. The recipe also works well with chicken thighs. Buy the same amount as rabbit and cook as directed here, but remove the skin from the thighs and check sooner for doneness, as they might finish in less time.

This is a very simple taco, common throughout Mexico, that I ate at whatever local market was nearby on almost all of my mornings there. It was always accompanied by copious amounts of orange juice freshly squeezed with a portable juicer at a neighboring street cart. They are a great way to start a day and one of my longtime favorites. Consider this recipe a tasty base for ingredients—whatever sounds good to you. Green chile powder is a nice addition, as is chipotle powder.

If you are in a rush and don’t want to make the Ranchero Sauce, buy a jar of roasted red chile salsa, drain off the liquid, and use what remains. Scramble the eggs over low heat, turning them gently with a wooden spatula or spoon. If the eggs turn white while cooking, the pan is too hot. The chopped cilantro adds bursts of fresh green, herbaceous flavors. For a more robust and traditional finish, squeeze fresh lime juice on the eggs when they are almost finished cooking.

The meat from the shank is the tastiest part of the lamb. As lamb is a grazing animal and stands probably 90 percent of the time, the leg muscles get more developed and flavorful. Braised meats take a little more time to cook, but not much time to prepare. They’re really very simple and almost foolproof, and the end result is really luscious, flavorful meat. It takes a little longer, but you get the best results if you cook them at as low an oven temperature as possible—around 200°F. Serve these tacos with this richly flavored filling during the colder months, when appetites yearn for something earthy and substantial. Shredding the meat along the grain produces pieces that better retain both moisture and flavor. The meat is best eaten the day it is cooked. Place the meat back in the sauce to reheat.

Tongue—la lengua, in Spanish—is a very popular food in Mexico, especially in the central and northern parts of the country, where good grazing land supported a large ranching culture. On ranches, most prime cuts are sold to markets, and the lesser cuts, like tongue, are cooked for the ranch hands. The use of tongue and other secondary cuts of meat, often overlooked, is at the core of peasant cooking. Made rich with brines, marinades, chiles, complex spice mixtures, and rich accompanying sauces, these preparations are some of the most flavorful in all of Latin American cuisine. Tongue is naturally succulent, but needs slow cooking to become really tender and luscious. The flavor is pretty neutral, so this filling has lots of additions to spice it up. A bright salsa is the finishing touch, much like the hot spicy-sweet mustard that was slathered on the tongue sandwiches that I used to eat at my old neighborhood delicatessens.

The first time I had these tacos was as a teenager on a working ranch owned by family friends outside of Guadalajara. A cadre of cooks from the same family—grandmother, mother, daughter—ran the kitchen. I was fascinated by how they used a comal set over a wood fire to dry-roast the tomatoes. I had never seen tomatoes cooked that way, nor had I ever stood before a live fire in a kitchen, with its bright, dancing flames and the crackling of the wood. The smoky, earthy atmosphere of that kitchen permeated the sauce made with supersweet tomatoes, vibrant onions and garlic, fiery chiles, and aromatic cilantro—so different from any other tomato sauce I’d ever eaten, such a different world of flavors and techniques. That day was one of the transformational moments in my cooking life.