'The Best Mexican Recipes' by America's Test Kitchen
Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week: The Best Mexican Recipes: Kitchen-Tested Recipes Put the Real Flavors of Mexico Within Reach by the editors at America’s Test Kitchen (ATK). In it, they pull recipes from all flavors of Mexican cuisine and test them for the American home cook until they’re foolproof.
Noteworthy: America’s Test Kitchen is known for its thorough — we’re not sure thorough is even thorough enough a word — testing of recipes. As founder Christopher Kimball, who is also editor of Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country, two magazines in the ATK family, put it in this book: “We start the process with a complete lack of conviction, which means that we accept no claim, no theory, no technique, and no recipe at face value. We simply assemble as many variations as possible, test a half-dozen of the most promising, and taste the results blind. We then construct our own hybrid recipe and continue to test it, varying ingredients, techniques, and cooking times until we reach a consensus. The result, we hope, it the best version of a particular recipe.”
The Team: The editors of ATK run the show. They develop or choose and test all the recipes, they take the photographs, they even published the book themselves. “This is our ultimate goal: to investigate the fundamental principles of cooking so that you become a better cook,” they write in this book’s introduction. “It is as simple as that.”
The Cuisine: This book addresses the entire Mexican repertoire: everything from street food and Mexican regional dishes to Tex-Mex, Mexican-Californian cuisine, and even loosely Mexican-inspired foods.
Who Should Buy It: Anyone with an interest in Mexican cooking. While the photographs aren’t the book’s selling point, the recipes are numerous, they work, and the step-by-step photos really help guide readers through some of the longer recipes such as making soles or mole poblano.
Must-Make Recipes: Take your pick, really. Our go-to recipes are the Classic Margarita, the Baja Fish Tacos with Pickled Onion and Cabbage, Chicken Tortilla Soup, and the Stuffed Jalapeños.
Check out other cookbooks from Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week:
