Tacos: 75 Authentic and Inspired Recipes [A Cookbook]

Tacos: 75 Authentic and Inspired Recipes [A Cookbook]

¡Ay, que rico! Tacos—real tacos, with soft or crispy corn tortillas, succulent fillings, and snappy salsas—are a revered street food on both sides of the border. In TACOS, Mark Miller adds a chef's sensibility to this vibrant primer for building delicious and authentic tacos.   The heart of a great taco is its filling, and TACOS brims with filling recipes for chicken, fowl, pork, beef, lamb, game, seafood, vegetable, and breakfast tacos. Miller's recipes are a satisfying balance between impeccably rendered classics like Carnitas (crusty fried pork shoulder), Rajas and Cheese (strips of roasted poblano chiles with melting queso Oaxaca ), and Beef Ranchero (with its smoky-spicy sauce), and fresh, sophisticated riffs like Chicken with Apples and Goat Cheese, Baja-Style Tempura Fish, and Roasted Tomatoes and Pumpkin Seed Pesto.   Rounding out the book are luscious photographs; thorough instructions for making soft tortillas from scratch and crafting them into crispy variations; recipes for salsas and accompaniments such as Guacamole and Refritos ("refried" beans); and a suite of essential techniques, like roasting chiles and blackening tomatoes. Each filling recipe provides suggestions for the best tortilla choices, salsas and sides, and beverages to complement the tacos—giving you all you need to make your next taco experience as authentic, inspired, and downright delicious as even the most well-seasoned taquero could make it. “While one might think of the taco as a simple street snack, Miller, chef and founder of Santa Fe’s Coyote Café, takes the Mexican favorite to a new level in this single-subject title. . . . An appealing sense of enthusiasm and authority.” —Publishers Weekly * A book of contemporary and classic taco recipes by a best-selling author and chef. * According to Food Channel Trendwire, authentic Latino food is exploding in popularity. * Includes sidebars on taco lore (history of fish tacos) and basics (making tortillas), with dozens of vibrant photographs. Mark Miller is the acclaimed chef-founder of Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has started and owned thirteen different restaurants on three continents from 1979 to 2008. He is the author of ten books with nearly 1 million copies in print, including Tacos , The Great Chile Book , The Great Salsa Book , and Coyote Cafe . Mark currently works in International Culinary Consulting and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.    Benjamin Hargett is a travel-loving chef who has cooked in Europe, the Carribean, Mexico, and the United States, where he worked with Mark Miller at the Coyote Café for many years.   Jane Horn is an award-winning cookbook writer and editor. She lives in Piedmont, California. The Art of the Taco I had a New England childhood and was always interested in food, cooking, and particularly markets. They were and still are an adventure for me. I loved to go shopping with my mother at our local First National, which still had sawdust on the floor in front of the butcher department. Then there was the exotic Italian grocery with its massive, overflowing window displays of every product from their sun-drenched culture (so anti-Puritan in New England!), the stores for salami and sausages, the Jewish delis for pickles and lox, and the fishmongers for live lobsters with huge claws that crawled along the bottoms of the deep cold-water tanks. I spent summers far away from New England in a more exotic culinary culture, in Mexico at a large hacienda near Guadalajara owned by family friends. In charge of the kitchen were three generations of cooks from one family - grandmother, mother, and daughter whose food and sauces were sublime, a revelation to me. In the early mornings they would go to the market to buy the fresh masa for the day, the sweetest, most colorful fruits, the ripest fresh vegetables picked just hours earlier from local gardens, cuts of meat butchered from whole animals. I’d always tag along on this food adventure. When the day’s shopping was finished, we always had time for a taco - the street snack everyone eats when they’re not at home or when they don’ t have the time or money to sit down at a restaurant. The women were as picky about tacos as they were about the ingredients for the daily meals. I would see all of the taco stands at the marketplace lined up. But my local taco guides were almost fierce in their determination that we would eat only from their favorites. "This is the best for pork," they’d say, urging me to a particular stall. I would soon have a wonderful taco of carnitas in my hand - succulent browned pork pieces with a touch of green cilantro and spicy roasted tomatillo-árbol sauce, all wrapped with a fresh corn tortilla. It was so different from the bologna on soft white bread that I was used to back at school. This food was alive, colorful, aromatic, tasty, crunchy, juicy, flavorful - as if I had crossed a new frontier of food experience. The tacos were always simple things -