Cooking In Mexican From A to Z Heritage Radio Network

On this episode of Cooking In Mexican From A to Z, Aarón and Zarela sit down with Lori Flores. Lori is an associate professor of History at Stony Brook University, where she teaches classes in US Latino, labor, immigration, and food history. They discuss Lori's background growing up in rural Texas, her migration to the East Coast, and how Mexican food arrived in East Coast cities like New York.

Lori is the author of the award-winning book Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale, 2016). Her new book on the history of Latino food workers in the US Northeast from 1940 to the present day has received support from the Russell Sage and Rockefeller Foundations.

On this episode, Sandro Canovas sits down with Aarón and Zarela to discuss Sotol, the state spirit of Chihuahua. They outline how it is made from plants of the dasylirion genus, close relatives of the onion, it's significance to the state of Chihuahua, and it's popularity in the United States.

Sandro is a bi-national third-generation brick maker turned adobero. Raised in Mexico City, aka Tenochtitlan, he immigrated to Oregon in 1995 and began working with earth-based construction techniques. After spending 19 years as a seasonal commercial fisherman in the Bering Sea of Alaska, he made his home in south Presidio County, Tejas.

Since early 2022, he has been a vocal opponent of the appropriation of Sotol in Texas. Spearheading the defense of the designation of Sotol that exists since 2002 for Chihuahua, Coahuila y Durango in Mexico. When not playing with mud he spends his time advocating and educating people about how the patrimony of the tradition of Sotol is affected by the appropriation efforts in the US and its industrialization in Mexico. Sandro started his campaign to protect Sotol in Texas by pressuring the distillery in Marfa to respect the DO and implement science based practices into their business model.

As a woman whose first sip of whisky created the female doppelganger of a Mr. Yuk sticker, Shelley Sackier’s view of the spirit changed on a trip to Scotland. After completing a short course in Scotland’s Bruichladdich Distillery, she began writing about — and working within — the world of whisky. For the past twenty-five years she has devoted her efforts toward creating a plainspoken, easygoing, and humorous grasp on the subject to welcome more into this realm. As the Director of Distillery Education at Reservoir Distillery in Virginia, her aim is to distill down this sophisticated spirit one simple sip at a time.

In this episode, Shelley sits down with Aarón and Zarela to talk about her journey into whiskey, how whiskey is defined, and Mexico's obsession with the brown spirit.

If you want to learn more about Shelley you can visit her at www.shelleysackier.com.

For more recipes from Zarela and Aarón, visit zarela.com and chefaaronsanchez.com

Bill Esparza is a James Beard award winning food writer, author of LA Mexicano, and on screen talent for food TV shows like Street Food: USA, Immigrant Kitchen, and Bizarre Foods. He talks with Zarela and Aaron about aguas frescas, his grandmother from Aguas Calientes, and his first taste of Mexico. Later, he discusses how he learned about regional variations in aquas frescas while touring around Mexico as a young musician.

Bill gives Aaron and Zarela examples of regional aguas frescas food pairings, including horchata as the antidote to spicy salsa. The three have a spirited debate on which fruits could NOT work in an agua fresca, and Aaron shares one of his favorite he's ever done: Honey Dew and Pepino , and his rum-based Horchata cocktail.

For more recipes from Zarela and Aarón, visit zarela.com and chefaaronsanchez.com

This week Aarón and Zarela are pleased to be joined by Benito Molina to talk about seafood in Ensenada and beyond. Chef Molina is the owner and chef of multiple restaurants in Ensenada, Baja California including Manzanilla, and he was thrilled to represent his people on MasterChef Latino. Working together with his wife Solange, their cuisine stands out for using fresh local seafood and for their focus on sustainability.

Benito shares how his uncle, who worked in Shrimp farming, inspired him to move to Baja and how working on tuna boats turned out to be a formative experience. Aarón asks Benito how his menu and seafood market availability has changed over the years, and he shares how Ensenada has grown to become an internationally renowned hot spot for seafood.

Plus, Chef Molina makes his ecological case for why you should eat sardines over salmon.

For more recipes from Zarela and Aarón, visit zarela.com and chefaaronsanchez.com

On this episode Zarela and Aarón are back for a second round of bugs! This time they are chatting with Carlos Leal, the creator of several culinary companies in Mexico that include: Compañía de Sales, Mortar and Sons, Loyal & Febre Destilados de Agave and Dodo el Vino. His interest in culinary experimentation led him to enroll in Masterchef Mexico 2018, where he made it to the semi-finals of the show. Both of Carlos' parents are biologists, so his interest in insects was instilled at an early age.

Throughout this episode, Carlos focuses on the wide array of flavors that insects contribute as ingredients. Along the way they discuss many species, including Chapulines (Cricket), the Maguey "Worm" (really a larvae), Escamoles (also known as "insect caviar"), and many more. They put eating insects in a global context, and wonder if eating insects could go from taboo to popular in the same way that sushi did in the west.

Plus, Zarela shares memories of eating acorn worms on the ranch, and you are already eating bugs without knowing it.

For more recipes from Zarela and Aarón, visit zarela.com and chefaaronsanchez.com