Welcome! We're veteran cookbook authors Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough. With over three dozen titles to our names, our latest is THE LOOK & COOK AIR FRYER BIBLE. You can find it here.

On this episode of our food and cooking podcast, Bruce interviews Sandra Gutierrez, author of the brand-new cookbook LATINÍSIMO. You can find that book at this link.

We've also got a one-minute cooking tip about skewers. And we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

[01:00] Our one-minute cooking tip: Use two skewers for grilled items so the foods don't spin around on the skewer when you turn it.

[02:53] Bruce's interview with Sandra Gutierrez, author of of the brand-new cookbook LATINÍSIMO.

[24:25] What’s making us happy in food this week? Bourbon and freshly dug fall vegetables.

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And I'm Mark Scarborough.

Together with Bruce, we have written 36 cookbooks, including our latest, as you well know, The Look and Cook Air Fryer Bible.

It is now on sale, and we are super stoked about it.

It is one of the best books we have ever written.

Both of us, when we unboxed it, were undone with the look of the book.

There are so many pictures.

It is.

Absolutely.

Seven hundred and four photographs.

Really?

Both of us were just dumbfounded and we have published a lot of cookbooks and I can tell you, I've looked at a lot of books and not been dumbfounded, but we were undone by this book.

Well, we're not going to talk about air frying in this podcast.

We're way away from that.

Instead, we've got, as is always the case, our one minute cooking tip.

Then we have an interview with.

Our friend Sandra Gutierrez about her brand new book, Latinissimo.

And then we're going to tell you what is making us happy in food this week.

So let's get started.

Today's one minute cooking tip is simple.

Use two skewers instead of one.

when you skewer anything from shrimp to beef to chicken so that when you turn the food on the grill or in your grill pan, the skewer doesn't just spin.

Yes, I have to say that I learned this from you.

I didn't know this and so I always used bamboo skewers and you know, before I met you and I would grill and then the pieces of steak or whatever, the mushrooms, et cetera, I would you know, go to turn it and they would just kind of, it was like a rollercoaster.

They just spin around and around and around.

Yeah, the skewer spins, the meat sticks to the grill.

So this way, you yank it off and it's ridiculous.

If you have two skewers, you lift them both up, the meat comes right up, you turn it over, no spinning.

So easy.

It is so easy.

And just so you know about bamboo skewers, If you are going to grill for fewer than 10 minutes, eight minutes, let's say, one in there, good grammar.

I know fewer than I'm, I, you know, studied English for a long time.

Um, if you're going to grill for fewer than 10 minutes, maybe like eight minutes or fewer,

less time than usual.

Less time than you would usually go.

You don't need to soak bamboo skewers.

No, only soak them if you're going for a long time, or if your grill is so hot that they may burn quickly.

But otherwise, don't worry about it.

Even when you crank the grill up to 500 degrees and they're on there for three minutes, they don't burn.

They don't incinerate.

They, not usually, no.

No, not much.

Okay, up next on the podcast, Bruce is going to have a chat with our friend, seriously our friend, we've known her a long time, Sandra Gutierrez, I remember going out to dinner with her when she was just starting out in the cookbook business, and now she has a brand new book out, Latinissimo, it is a compendium of foods from across Latin America.

I am speaking with Sandra Gutierrez.

She is a food journalist, a cookbook author, a cooking instructor, a national expert of Latin American foodways and Southern U.

S.

cuisine.

She's also a dear friend, and she has just published Latinissimo, an encyclopedic collection of Everyday Recipes covering the home cooking of all 21 Latin American nations.

Hey, Sandra, welcome.

Hi, Bruce.

Thank you for having me.

Oh man, this was quite an undertaking, this book.

It's beautiful.

It's enormous.

Uh, it's, I'm sure it took a lot out of you.

It's heavy, isn't it?

So your book starts off with an analogy, and I love this.

You compare Latin American food To a house.

Explain it more to me.

Okay, so I do.

I compare it to a house and I say the front door is Mexican cuisine because that's the one cuisine that most people are familiar with.

You know, most people around the world recognize tacos, enchiladas, moles, but then if you walk through the threshold of that house, you find 20 other kitchens.

And they're each as exciting as the next one and they're all different from each other and they're all as exciting and as vibrant as Mexican cuisine is.

So I just say, venture into the house and start opening all the different doors of the kitchens and, and, and see, see what's there because they're worth finding.

Sandra, we've all learned about how foods from the New World, the Americas, have influenced cooking throughout Europe.

I mean, what would Italian food today be without tomatoes from the New World?

But what about the other direction?

How did European colonialization of the Americas, and especially the centuries of slavery influence, affect Latin American cuisine?

Uh, the effects were enormous.

It was just as...

I call it a tsunami, really, a global tsunami of flavors and ingredients that collided in the Americas, really to produce the first globalized exchange of food waste.

Uh, the Europeans bring with them citrus, all sorts of, uh, poultry, except for turkey, which was the only one the Americas have, and pork.

I cannot even imagine, uh, Americans without pork.

They bring, uh, rice, of course, cilantro.

Cilantro is not from Mexico.

It's from the, from the Arab countries, from the Middle East.

And so that comes in.

And of course it's so important in Latin America.

They bring pepper, onions.

Garlic, all of these ingredients that are really pivotal for for the basis of Latin American cooking.

So there are many, many ingredients that were very important and brought over by Europeans.

Now, the African element or the African vein, I find to be pivotal and very, very important to Latin American foodways.

And I know that is such a painful part of our history, both the Southern United States region, and most of the world really has been touched by slavery of some point, if not then now.

Africans bring with them coffee, okra, plantains.

One of the true components of African, the African vein in the Americas, of course, are any dishes that are made with rice and beans, the combination of rice and beans.

They were, the Africans were used to combining rice and peas, like black eyed peas.

That came from Africa, but all of the beans were here in the Americas.

And they were the first ones to make the combination.

And now in almost every country with variations, you will find combinations of rice and beans in Belize.

There's a wonderful dish.

And I put it in the book.

It's a combination of red beans with white rice that are cooked in coconut milk.

And it is.

Delicious.

Before we get into talking about some of the different cooking styles and recipes from the book, I wanna talk about some basics.

Maybe you'll agree with me that there's nothing more basic to almost all Latin American cooking than a sofrito.

So what is it and how is it used?

Okay, so sofrito, uh, was a technique, a culinary technique, and.

cooking base that the Spaniards brought to the Americas.

It was originally called sofregit.

You can find the very first recipes written down in the book, Le Sauvet, which is, I don't know how many centuries back it goes, but it's one of the very first cookbooks ever written from Europe.

And sofrito used to be, or sofregit used to be a base of onions, garlic, and oil only.

And that's what they brought to the Americas.

But once they got to this territory, they start adding native ingredients to each one of their lands.

So, for instance, in Cuba, they start adding annatto or achiote.

Though in Puerto Rico, they call it differently.

They call it recao and they add longleaf culantro, which is different from cilantro.

It's like a sawtooth kind of long leaf that has.

What I call, um, uber cilantro taste, uh, you go to other countries where this in Central America, you start adding tomatoes in Mexico, you start adding chiles.

And so each country forms their own flavor base, all of them based on the original sofrito.

And that is what differentiates the basic cuisine of every country.

And I invite my readers to combine the difference of fritos.

one type of sofrito with a pot of rice.

Each time they make a pot of rice, start it with a different kind of sofrito, and you'll be able to taste the different countries just by making that simple change.

You have

an entire chapter in your book devoted to corn, and it's even on the cover.

You have two beautiful, perfect years of white corn.

Clearly, this grain is important to Latin American cooking.

Are we talking about the sweet corn that we enjoy eating off the cob at barbecues, or is this corn more than that?

It's much more than that.

The corn we eat today is hybrid corn.

It's a corn that has been created for us to eat and we can eat it straight, uh, just like that.

But we're talking about indigenous corns, native corns, heirloom corns that are still existent today.

Some of which are being rediscovered or saved.

Let's put it from, from the danger of complete extinction.

But I chose corn because when we chose to divide the book, how was I going to divide it and still be Inclusive to every one of the countries and doing it by country was very limiting because they would only give me give me maybe 2025 recipes per country.

And that's not enough to really showcase the similarities and differences between each country.

So I decided to go by ingredient and what the ingredients did for me is they provided a thread.

If you will, uh, through which I could tie together all the different cuisines and in a way build a quilt of all these different patchworks and the most important of.

All of the threads that connect Latin America is corn because corn is the backbone.

Every single country in Latin America uses corn.

And it was corn, of course, was domesticated in the Americas.

It's native to the Americas, and it has actually fed millions of people across the world.

And so that's what made corn the one ingredient that I chose to put on the cover.

And what makes the chapter also so big.

So talking about corn, one of the most common things everybody eats made from corn or tortillas, are they limited to Mexico or can you find them all over Latin America?

And what tips do you have as a chef to give to people who are trying to make tortillas at home?

Okay, so this is very interesting, the tortilla as we know it, uh, mixed with corn flatbread exists only in what the territory known as Mesoamerica, Mexico and through Central America.

Throughout the Mesoamerican territory, the tortilla actually changes shape, size and thickness, so that it becomes rounder and puffier and thicker in some places like a salad or it becomes stuffed, you always eat it stuffed with something.

And then of course the flour tortillas, which flour was brought by the Spaniards.

Wheat, and that is popular in some places like northern Mexico in parts of Guatemala and definitely in Honduras where they use it to make breakfast burritos called baleadas, which are delicious.

But once you cross over into South America, the tortilla as we know it to make tacos disappears.

And another corn flatbread comes into the picture.

And those are arepas or the arepa.

It's still an externalized corn, but it's a completely different treatment.

And it produces What I like to Referred to as a whole cake in many ways, very similar to what Native Americans did in the South, creating their whole cake.

But they're thicker than tortillas, and the outside becomes like crispy and hard, but the inside remains soft like polenta.

And it tastes very much like a polenta.

So it's a completely different thing.

And once you go into Brazil and parts of Venezuela and parts of South America, Then you even see that flapper changing into those produced with yucca.

And, uh, and those are thinner and crispier and, and it's just completely different.,

do you have any tips for someone trying to make, uh, tortillas?

Let's say the Mexican style tortillas at home for the first time.

Yes.

The first time you make it, I would say use masa harina and get used to what masa feels like when it's wet, to make sure that it's wet enough that it doesn't crack when you pat it.

But I offer you the real way of making, uh, mixtamal.

Which is, um, soaking corn in lime or calcium hydroxide overnight and then removing the outer kernel and then, you know, milling it and grinding it and making your masa.

And I know that most people are not going to do it.

It's the one recipe that I had to include because I couldn't write a book on Latin American food and not include the original way of making tortillas.

But in order to make it really friendly for the home cook, I developed a food processor method.

And the food processor method makes it super easy to make tortillas and to make fresh masa every single day of the week.

And it just saves so much trouble.

So I would say, if you've never made them, start with masa harina.

If you want to make them every day and you still don't know how, continue with masa harina.

But if you ever want to try your own, try the food processor method.

It's really fun.

I can only imagine the flavor difference between a fresh tortilla when you nixtamalize your own corn versus using masa harina.

Can you describe what that difference is?

There is this umami that the nixtamalized corn, when it's fresh, it's almost nutty.

It's earthier, if you will, um, and the tortilla itself is meatier and it puffs up easy, easier.

There's more water content in it than there is, of course, in the dehydrated masa.

I just think that once in a lifetime, once in your lifetime, you should try a real tortilla.

You brought up yucca, um, just before, so I want to jump to a question about that.

You talk about the history and offer recipes for a lot of well known ingredients, avocados, plantains, but you also go for less familiar.

Like yucca, a lot of U.

S.

cooks don't know what that is.

So what is it?

And besides making the tortillas down in South America, what do you use it for?

So yucca is the root or the tuber of the Manihach Esculenta plant, and it is It's a starchy plant.

It looks like a long snake and it varies in length and it's brown or a little purplish outside and inside it's white and it's very, very starchy.

It's very similar to potato, but it's even creamier and if you will, a little stickier and sweeter than a potato.

And it is a fantastic ingredient that, uh, was, is native to the Amazons, uh, and that has traveled all over the world.

You use it in different fashions.

The beauty of yucca is its versatility.

You can bake it, you can boil it, you can grind it.

It's very versatile.

You can fry it and make fries out of it, like french fries.

You can slice it thinly and make yucca chips.

that are, they're amazing to dip into in sauces and things and it won't break like a potato chip.

And you can make cakes out of it.

And in the book I have a recipe that Brazilians make, everyday Brazilians make, um, which are gnocchi.

Gnocchi made with yucca instead of potatoes.

And they are Exquisite.

They're sweeter.

They're easy to maneuver because the yucca is a little stickier.

So it's much, it requires less flour.

It is a truly versatile ingredient.

I also have desserts made out of it.

I have crackers made out of it.

I have a bread that magically comes together on the pan that you just mix yucca flour with cheese and a little bit of milk, and then just pour this crumbly mixture on a pan.

And as it melts, it becomes this chewy, delicious bread.

Sandra, in your book, you refer to chilies as a fruit, and I think most people, especially in the U.

S., just think of them as a spicy vegetable or a spicy whatever.

Is Latin American cooking even possible without chilies?

Yes.

Yes.

Uh, chilies are fruits.

And yet, many Latin American countries do not use chiles or hot chiles in their cooking at all.

Cuba is one of those countries.

Uh, Cuba and Venezuelan cuisines are both countries that shy away from using any heat.

Those are cuisines that are highly...

European based, mostly Spaniard, uh, and so the Spaniards didn't have any chiles, so you'll find a lot of rices, you have, you have a lot of spices, like cumin, and again, dianato, and, um, paprikas, and things like that, but you do not find heat.

However, you have those cuisines in Latin America that depend enormously on the heat of peppers, of course, the most famous being Mexico, but Peru is another one that uses a copious amount of chiles, which actually are known by a different name in South America.

They are known as aji instead of chile.

So you will find aji amarillo, a yellow chile from Peru, that it's fruity and sweeter, but Still spicy.

We don't even all use the same chiles, which is still interesting depending on what part you are.

And then of course there are the sweet chiles, all the little ajicitos, dulces that are used in the Caribbean that have no heat, that look extremely alike to the habaneros.

They look exactly like habaneros, but they have none of that heat.

You know, if you're able to find a cuisine that doesn't have any heat and you don't like the spiciness and the heat of chile, you will find a good point of departure to try new Latin American cuisines without having to take a huge leap of faith.

Sandra, I want to talk about some of the recipes in your book.

The flavors are complex, but Most of the finished dishes have a simplicity that I think seems very comforting.

There's a soup you have in the book called, maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong, Bori Bori.

And there are corn dumplings in it that I'd like you to talk about because I passed by the soup and it just went, oh, that just reminded me of matzo ball soup from Eastern Europe.

So what is Bori Bori?

Bori Bori is a Paraguayan soup from Bori meaning ball from the Guarani language.

And um, It's very special because, well, the book is made up of everyday recipes.

I did not...

find any recipe that's obscure or difficult.

I wanted people to know what your contemporary cooks are cooking today when they go home and they make dinner every single day in Latin America.

So many of the recipes are still, uh, very popular today, but this is a recipe that comes from ancient times, except they didn't do it with chicken originally because it wasn't here.

But the treatment of the little cornmeal balls is very similar to the treatment that you would give matzo balls.

I also found it fascinating when I first had it, but it's a mixture of cornmeal with egg and some cheese, similar to a queso fresco.

And you make this little balls and first you boil them in water as you would.

Matzo balls.

And then you add them to the soup.

And the soup is made of a clear chicken broth, to which butternut squash chunks are added.

And then big pieces of chicken are added to the soup.

It's very simple, very comforting, um, very homey.

And those are the kinds of recipes that I included in this book.

And what I think makes this book different from any other Latin American cookbook out there.

Um, it's, it's the fact that these are recipes that have survived.

through the centuries.

Some of them are modern, but they are what people are cooking today.

And there's a historic basis as to why the recipes are still cooked today.

Um, but it's not a, it's not a history book.

It's a readable book, but it's a cookbook and it's very easy recipes.

Most of which can be made very quickly.

Sandra, you are the expert.

So please tell me, how do you build the perfect taco?

Oh, the perfect taco starts with a perfect tortilla.

So I would say.

Find a tortilla that's thick enough to hold your filling so that it doesn't disintegrate before it goes up to your mouth.

It could be a flour tortilla or a corn tortilla, depending on who you ask.

Because if you're in northern Mexico, they're going to go for a flour tortilla, but if you're in the rest of Latin America, you'll go for a corn tortilla.

I would say make your own so you can make it thick enough, but that's where it starts.

It continues with a filling.

The filling is typically a meat or a vegetable.

It could be mushrooms.

It could be potatoes and rajas, which are poblano strips that have been roasted.

It could be beef.

It could be a chicken breast, whatever it is.

Highly seasoned because that is the price that you get when you bite into a taco.

The tortilla is the vessel and it's very neutral tasting.

So the filling is important.

And then to me, the most Fun part of a taco are the toppings, and that's where you can go free and create even two people starting with the same tortilla and the same filling could create two completely different tacos depending on what toppings you put and you have a gamut of adding onions and cilantro and lemon and salsas and hot sauce and moles and whatever you want to add, avocado, um, so that's where you have fun.

But to me, that's a perfect taco.

It's one that starts with a good base, a good middle and a good ending.

So yesterday, Mark asked me if I could please make a bean dish this weekend because you've been craving beans.

So if you had to choose one bean dish from your book that you can eat every weekend that I should make this weekend, what is it?

Oh, that's a tricky one because there are so many dishes that I could live on.

I eat beans almost every day.

So I would say I would start with just your, your Frijoles express or your beans express that are just cooked in your instant pot very quickly.

So you have a good base.

But there's a really fun recipe that's easy to make that is a Puerto Rican bean dish with olives and potatoes.

Believe it or not, olives and potatoes.

And it is sensational.

And to me, that's what Puerto Rico tastes like.

But there are many, many, uh, being dishes.

There's one from Nicaragua that's, um, golden and there's one from El Salvador.

See, I keep going on, but there's one from El Salvador that you make by stewing pork rinds with the red beans and the pork rinds become chewy and like beef with like pork pieces.

And you just can't stop eating it.

And it's a common breakfast in El Salvador.

There's so many.

I could have written a whole, well, I already did write a whole book about beans, but I could have written a whole other book about Latin American beans.

Sandra, I could spend all day talking to you about Latin American food.

Your new book, Latinissimo, it is on sale now.

Home recipes from the 21 countries of Latin America.

Thank you so much for this beautiful book and for spending some time with me this morning.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, I'm kind of jealous that you got to talk to her, you.

Well, we can have her back and you could talk to her.

fine.

Okay, fine.

Sure, sure.

We can do that.

Hey, Sandy, if you're listening, guess what?

You're invited back

. Mark: Okay.

You can get back on and you can talk about, we can talk more about various foods from Latin America.

It's, it's a, it's a giant book.

I, I mean, a giant.

It is.

And she does all the food in the book herself, and it's beautiful.

And I can't wait to dig into some of these recipes.

That one we talked about with the corn dumplings.

It's like, oh, I might have to make that instead of matzo balls for Passover.

I

know.

We talked about it, and you showed me that recipe, and I was like, uh, can you make me these?

I mean, there is cheese in them, but that, you know, we're not kosher, so I don't care.

No, we're not kosher, although we pretend to be kosher for certain holidays, but no, we're not kosher.

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It's somehow connected to this podcast.

Sometimes, sometimes it's completely other things going on in our lives about the seasonal change in new England.

It's all over the place in terms of what it talks about.

So it's not connected directly.

What's making us happy in food this week

what's making me happy in food this week is something we gave to a friend as a birthday present and I wasn't given this for a birthday present, but I have a birthday coming up soon.

Anyway, it's, yeah, I'm not a huge bourbon drinker

to say the least.

I'm really not.

And I don't usually like bourbon.

You don't like your.

But we gave this friend a bottle of chestnut farms.

Burbon, 100 proof, bottled in bond, and it was beyond, it didn't even taste like bourbon, it was just caramel y and vanilla y, and it almost tasted like rum, it was, oh, it was Say the name of it again?

Chestnut Farms, 100 proof.

Bottled in Bond.

Yeah, and let me just say that, um, this is a total splurge, and we had to split this bottle of bourbon with another couple to pay for it.

So, it's not like, wow, let's just go out and slam this bottle back.

Although, I have to say the other night, sitting at their table, I s How many times did you pour?

Three.

I slammed a little bit of it back.

I had three fingers of it over the course of like an hour and a half.

And I have to tell you that when we got up to leave their house, I was talking all about, uh

And he was checking your pockets for the bottle.

I wasn't able to form my words really well.

I found myself talking very slowly because I couldn't actually say what I wanted to say, which is really hard for me since I talk so fast.

Anyway, um, yeah, it was really super delicious and I loved it.

And I want to say what's making me happy in food this week is actually at that same dinner.

And that is, uh, these people are inveterate gardeners.

And he just stood at the stove and while we sat at the table, he made, uh, he boiled fresh dug carrots and then he boiled up some fresh dug potatoes and that like, these are courses seriously.

And then he boiled up fresh dug parsnips and we just sat there in with bowls of like each a potato or two or three little carrots or, you know, a parsnip cut it into a few pieces for each of us.

We put butter on them in the bowls and it was so super delicious.

They had dug these root vegetables that very day.

Yeah, like an hour before we got there.

And it was so good.

It was magical because we're just sitting in their kitchen and he's just standing at the stove making these things.

I should tell you that this couple are, they're quite a bit older than we are.

They're in their late eighties.

And so he's just standing at the stove, boiling these vegetables one by one.

And I know it sounds really pedestrian and simple, but it just was so.

Perfect.

Followed by that bourbon.

It was amazing.

Yeah.

Followed by that bourbon.

It was like a, a memorable experience.

Not everything that's memorable, and this is a good rule, but everything that is memorable is fancy.

It's not a peri breast.

It's not, you know, a gata santa no re.

I mean, those are lovely things.

Who doesn't like those things?

But not.

Everything is a monumental effort.

Some of the simplest things are actually the best.

Well,

I would say it's a monumental effort for them to tend their gardens and to grow those vegetables.

Of course.

On the front end, that was a monumental effort.

Yeah, I meant time at the stove.

Right, yeah.

But, um, it was just, it was really crazy.

Just to tell you how crazy it was, I think, I know I'm going on forever, but at the end of it all, after he boiled those three root vegetables, we drank the water in the saucepan, and it was like...

The vegetable water in there.

Isn't that soup?

I know that's really how, what it was like.

It was kind of crazy and really totally memorable.

And then we drank too much bourbon.

Okay.

That's the podcast for this week.

Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for listening to Sandy Gutierrez.

Thanks to her for being on the podcast and we would love to have you back.

If you subscribe, you won't miss a single episode and every episode we tell you what's making.

us happy in food this week.

We want to know what's making you happy in food.

You could share that with us either in an email through our website, bruceandmark.

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