Taco

I have eaten more than my share of fish tacos while living in Baja. But the beach is a half-hour drive from my house, so I was on a mission to find a fish taco recipe that I could make at home—one that was as delicious and authentic as the taco they serve at my favorite Rosarito taco shack. This is what I came up with—and I’m happy to say it competes!

Sarandeado, as a technique, refers to grilling a cleaned fish in a basket, constantly flipping it from one side to the other in order to preserve all the juices and flavors before they seep out of the fish. In this recipe we use the oven, so there’s no need for a fish basket or even a grill. It is essential, however, that you use a properly butterflied fish (the skin prevents the juices from seeping out and yields a moist and succulent fish). I strongly suggest asking your fishmonger to do it for you.

Taquitos, also known as flautas where I grew up, are corn tortillas that are stuffed, rolled, and fried. Shredded chicken or beef is the traditional filling, but here I use mushrooms and pair them with a tart tomatillo salsa for a great vegetarian dish.

Fish breathes new life into the “sandwich” of Mexico and the Southwest, replacing mystery meat with an identifiable fillet of delicate white fish like cod to make fish tacos, a rarity on the East Coast. Instead of frying, as is common in tacquerias, I like to steam the fish in its own juices, which can be done on top of the stove or in a microwave oven (in fact, this is one of the few cooking tasks at which the microwave excels).

If you have had only the fast-food variety of tacos or made them using a mix, these will come as a revelation, yet they’re quite easy to make. Top them with sour cream, any salsa (pages 610–612), Guacamole (page 22), or a combination; they are also delicious on their own. There is a wealth of variations here; if you’re not interested in frying, see the soft taco version. The chicken can be cooked by any method you like; poaching with aromatic vegetables and spices will work, along with producing a decent stock.

Fish tacos, long a staple of coastal Mexico (and coastal California), have become popular throughout the U.S. I prefer the fish fried, but you can grill or even steam it if you like.

GINA Fish tacos—you gotta love them. But of course seafood has always been my thing. The key to this dish lies in the freshness of your coleslaw. You can always use store-bought, but our recipe is so quick, and making it fresh adds a crispness that I’m not too sure store-bought can provide. Also, the jalapeño pepper in the slaw, combined with the chipotle mayo, makes our slaw smoky and spicy! I think catfish works better than other fish, because it has a good way of standing up to the heat of the frying pan . . . plus, I just love the flavor. This may be because our family had a tradition of eating catfish every Friday night for dinner. (We were probably making fish tacos before they got a fancy reputation.) And I have this thing about wraps—because you can pile everything into them and then just munch it down.

The creamy red-cabbage slaw can also be served on sandwiches or as a side dish. For a toasted flavor, quickly heat the tortillas over a gas burner until blistered in spots, holding each with tongs and waving it from side to side.

Radish and avocado are traditional Mexican toppings for tacos. Here they are combined in a salsa that can be served with tacos or as an appetizer with tortilla chips.

Taco seasoning can cover all manner of sins, but when I first saw textured vegetable protein, I was a bit apprehensive: could it possibly taste any better than driveway gravel? As it turns out, it’s pretty amazing stuff. In water, it expands to more than twice its original volume, and it picks up the flavors of whatever you combine it with. It has the texture of ground beef, but it’s way cheaper. This all makes it perfect for these classic tacos in a crispy shell, which are usually filled with seasoned ground beef. You can buy it at your local produce market or natural foods store in the bulk food section.

We have two recipes for tacos in this book, which may seem repetitive, but the only similarity is the tortillas and cheese. This version has the great combo of black beans and corn, with a little bit of zip from the sauce.

Puffy tacos have become modern-day icons of the San Antonio food scene. You can find the meat-filled, deep-fried corn tortillas throughout the Alamo City and—believe it or not—on the baseball field, too, where Henry, the Puffy Taco, serves as a mascot for the San Antonio Mission, a minor league team. I propose a build-your-own puffy taco party, where guests crowd into the kitchen to feast on hotfrom-the-skillet tacos stuffed with bison chili, a dab of guacamole, and whatever other fixings you set out. Ask friends to act as revolving fry cooks, so nobody gets stuck by the stove for too long, and in the meantime, assign others to shake up batches of Silver Bullet Margaritas (page 175). Diana Barrios Trevino, friend and the restaurateur behind San Antonio’s La Hacienda de los Barrios, gave me permission to use her famous puffy taco recipe. It was the recipe that beat TV chef Bobby Flay in a puffy taco “throwdown” staged for Flay’s popular Food Network show. If you can find fresh masa dough, use it to make the tortillas. Otherwise, dried masa mix will work just fine.

Shrimp and citrus make such a natural match, I often combine them in tacos, but they call out for something with a little heft, such as black beans. Depending on the size grapefruit you use, you’ll probably have more than you need for this recipe, but that’s not a problem. Just eat the remaining sections for breakfast with a little yogurt, for dessert instead of the oranges in the Yogurt Parfait with Mulled Red Wine Syrup (page 161), or in a smoothie with banana and milk. I like to sometimes double up the salsa on this taco, drizzling on a little Salsa Verde (page 14) in addition to the on-the-fly grapefruit–black bean salsa, but these tacos are plenty flavorful without it.

After moving from Austin to Boston, I would periodically get such a jones for Tex-Mex food that nothing would satisfy it but a casserole dish full of enchiladas stuffed with chunks of smoked turkey and slathered in a spicy-sweet green mole sauce. They had been a favorite of mine at Z’Tejas, at the time a funky place on 6th Street, but now a small chain with outposts in Texas, Utah, California, Arizona, and Washington State. I was thrilled when the Austin American-Statesman ran a recipe for the enchiladas a few years after I left town. It enabled me to invite over a mix of fellow Tex-pats and native New Englanders and have everyone marveling at the revelation that is a chocolate-free mole sauce. All these years later, the revelation for me was how easily they morphed into soft tacos, still with that unusual combination of smoked turkey breast and mole verde. For this, the smoked turkey should be cut from a very thick slice, so either buy a whole or half smoked breast yourself and cut it from there, or ask your deli to custom-cut a 1/2-inch slice or two.

You know you’ve got a taco problem when you make a duck breast recipe from a destined-to-be-classic Chinese cookbook and think, “Wouldn’t these be good in tortillas?” Yes, that’s what happened to me when I tried Eileen Yin-Fei Lo’s simple baked duck breasts from Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking. I served them for a Chinese dinner that night, but pretty soon I was playing around with a riff on five-spice powder, combining Asian and Mexican ingredients and rubbing them into the breasts before using Lo’s baking technique. A sweet, sour, and spicy plum salsa was just the thing to cut through and complement the deep flavors of the rich duck.

You’ve done the work to make the Yucatan-Style Slow-Roasted Pork (page 66) already, so now you get to take advantage of its depth of flavor and combine it with a fiery (and I mean that) salsa and Citrus-Pickled Onions (page 19) in these vibrant tacos. This recipe makes about 1/4 cup of the salsa, and a little goes a long way, so you may have some left over. It will last for 2 weeks refrigerated in an airtight container, and you can use it on all manner of eggs and meats, and as a salad dressing base, but my favorite use might be to mash a tablespoon or two into the yolks of a half dozen hard-cooked eggs, along with mayo, for a party snack that puts the devil back into deviled eggs, for sure. (And yes, pickled onions are good on those babies, too.)

This recipe is as much of a mash-up as the idea of Korean tacos in the first place, made famous and trendy by the Kogi BBQ truck in Los Angeles. I took the idea of using prune juice to tenderize and marinate short ribs from Rozanne Gold’s Recipes 1-2-3 and the idea to include Asian pear, scallions, and sesame seeds from Joanne Chang of Boston’s Myers + Chang restaurant. This makes enough short ribs for three or four meals, depending on your appetite. (In addition to these tacos, you can toss the short ribs with egg noodles, eat over polenta, or layer into a particularly sophisticated take on nachos.)

If you haven’t eaten tacos in Mexico City, then as far as I’m concerned, you haven’t really eaten tacos. Countless joints there specialize in tacos al pastor, carved off a spit like the shawarma from which it is derived, but with the delectable addition of pineapple (and with tortillas, naturally, instead of pita). They usually make a bit of a show of it, too: At El Califa, my sister and I watched the taco guy hold a plate with two tortillas on it in one hand, then use a long knife in the other to swipe off a chunk of pork, which fell right onto one of the tortillas. He quickly reached higher and sliced off a bit of the pineapple ring that was sitting on top of the spit, catching the fruit, too, on the tortilla. One of El Califa’s other specialties is a steak cutlet taco: The single piece of meat is longer than the tortilla, but it’s so tender it folds up inside and you can bite through it with your teeth. I like to combine the two ideas into one: using a thin cutlet of pork that I quickly marinate in pineapple juice and combining the traditional garnishes of onion, cilantro, pineapple, and lime into a quick salsa.

Carnivores need a veggie break now and then, and this taco satisfies. The moist mushrooms stand in for the meat, the onions pack a sweet-spicy punch, goat cheese adds a touch of tart richness, good old lettuce gives the crunch, and a final drizzle of Salsa Verde (page 14) reminds you that, well, every taco can benefit from a final drizzle of salsa.

These simple, satisfying tacos were inspired by breakfast tacos in Austin, roasted sweet potatoes sold by street vendors in Mexico City, and the need for a quick, spicy meal to be devoured in front of the TV after a long workday.