With Fonda's Chef, Comida Mexicana at Home

Robert Santibañez began his cooking career as a 6-year-old in Mexico City. As his grandmother and aunts gathered together in the kitchen one day to make tamales de chipilin, Santibañez and his other young cousins were given bits of masa and filling to play with.

“They were making serious tamales and they gave us little pieces. We would make our itty bitty tamales,” Santibañez said. “Then they would steam them and they would give you your little tamale and it was such a great achievement.”

Now, after years spent as a professional chef in kitchens from Mexico City to Park Slope’s own Fonda, he hopes to bring his culinary vision into your kitchen with his new book, Truly Mexican, due out on April 25 from Wiley Publishing.

While the book does boast recipes for Santibañez staples like chilaquiles and tamales, what’s most impressive is the book’s arsenal of salsas, guacamoles and other staples of Mexican cookery.

The idea for the book, Santibañez’s second, came out of his work training other chefs in Mexican cuisine. (He runs a consulting firm that helps large food corporations develop and improve their Mexican recipes.)

“The recipe banks are full of bad Mexican recipes,” he said. “To achieve the perfect flavor profile so distinctively Mexican, you need to have this balance of things. All those spices and flavors, and people just don’t understand how to get there, you know? They just grind some tomatoes and put some cumin in it and they think it tastes Mexican.”

While he admires the work of authors like Rick Bayless who have created books highlighting the regional diversity and history of Mexican food, Santibañez believes that breaking down the cuisine into its basic building blocks could help demystify it and make it more accessible.

“You open up these book and there is one salsa, and in another chapter there’s another salsa. And then you open another book and then there’s two other very similar salsa, but somebody telling you that they come from a different place, a different region. So people only get an idea that Mexican food is so incredibly vast and difficult.”

Drawing on his experience learning the repertoire of French sauces from the system developed by chefs like Escoffier and Carême while studying at the famous French culinary institute Le Cordon Bleu, Santibañez focuses on the techniques that unite food from Mexico’s different regions.

The result is a lushly photographed compendium structured around fundamental sauces and condiments. It begins with a detailed guide to the primary ingredients of Mexican cooking, describing herbs such as epazote and hoja santa, and offers specific instructions on “chopping cilantro the Mexican way” (you start with the stems). There’s a helpful table breaking down the variety of chiles used in Mexican cooking and how to treat them, and an explanation of Mexican roasting techniques, which use dry heat instead of oil. If you want to get super serious, there’s instructions for making your own tortillas. If you don’t, there’s a handy guide to heating up store-bought ones two at a time.

As the book moves into recipes, Santibañez divides the work into salsas, guacamoles, adobos, moles and pipianes, introducing each one with an informal and chatty tone that encourages experimentation and a variety of applications. While he carefully schools home cooks on the proper ways to make classics like adobo de guajillo and pico de gallo, he sneaks in a few innovations, like a sweet strawberry salsa with arbol chiles that he recommends drizzling over vanilla ice cream.

New York’s Mexican dining scene has vastly improved since Santibañez first came here in 1997. He says this is partly to do the political and social troubles that have plagued Mexico in recent years, changing the patterns of migration.

 "All of a sudden in the past ten years, you have everybody here, all the strata: middle, middle-low, middle high. Everybody lives here. So the rich are investing and they’re opening restaurants. It’s amazing how much it has changed, and the availability of the ingredients is incredible.”

Since opening Fonda in 2009, Santibañez has continued to extend the reaches of his own Mexican empire with the Taco Truck in Hoboken.

But despite the growing diversity of Mexican options here, Santibañez laments one lingering misconception: that Mexican food is unhealthy.

“There’s really nothing healthier than Mexican food,” he said. “The European sauce-making is basically based on cream, butter, you know, reductions of proteins and broths, and Mexican food is based on vegetable matter. All of our sauces are based on tomatillos, chiles, garlic, onions, tomatoes, dried chiles, peanuts, pumpkin seeds.”

With its emphasis on fresh ingredients and huge, vibrant photos of tomatoes, tomatillos and chilies, Truly Mexican makes this point very clear.

Taco-shop Guacamole

From Truly Mexican by Roberto Santibañez

This creamy guacamole – commonly found in central Mexico’s taco shops – blurs the line between salsa and guacamole.

Ingredients:

½ pound tomatillos (5 or 6), husked, rinsed and coarsely chopped

6 large (about 3 ½ inches long) fresh epazote or cilantro leaves

2 small garlic cloves, peeled and coarsely chopped

½ cup coarsely chopped white onion

2 fresh serrano or jalapeño chiles, coarsely chopped, or more to taste

1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lime juice, or more to taste

½ teaspoon fine salt or 1 teaspoon kosher salt

1 small ripe Mexican Hass avocado, halved and pitted

Directions:

Put the tomatillos into the blender jar first, then add the epazote, garlic, onion, chiles, lime juice and salt. Blend until very smooth, at least a minute. Scoop the avocado flesh with a spoon into the blender jar and blend until smooth. Add a little water, if necessary, to achieve a pourable texture. Season to taste with additional chile, lime juice and salt, and blend once more.