A Mexican Chef Spices Up the Southern Kitchen
Starred review from January 15, 2018
In his first cookbook, Hernandez, executive chef of the Taqueria del Sol restaurants, delivers a fun and adventurous mash-up of his influences—he was born in Mexico, raised in the American South, and developed a love of New Orleans cuisine. The common denominator here is heat, especially in the form of various peppers. For breakfast, there is a spicy Cajun hash with andouille sausage. For a hearty soup, there is posole, in which pounds of pork butt and four cups of hominy are flavored with the puree of 30 dried chiles. For dessert—ancho-chile pralines. Hernandez enjoys teasing a bland food with a spicy kick, thus presenting meatloaf with tomato-habanero gravy, mac and cheese with feta and jalapeños, and buttermilk fried chicken with green-chile-horseradish sauce. But tacos are the soul of the book, and these are simple yet complex, with 20 different varieties. There are Americanized versions such as the cheeseburger taco, as well as traditional carnitas tacos and regionalized offerings such as a Nashville hot chicken taco. Puckett, the former food editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, renders Hernandez’s stories in tight, captivating prose, and photographer Mosier showcases, for example, a small island of creamy grits surrounded by pink shrimp in a bowl of tomato and jalapeño puree. This is an outstanding cookbook of innovative recipes.
March 1, 2018
Tex-Mex has a long-standing presence on the American food scene, but it took a special chef to cross Mexican and traditional southern cooking and generate a new American hybrid. Hernandez, a renegade rocker, eventually landed in Atlanta and proceeded to transform a mediocre Tex-Mex restaurant into an amalgam of Mexican and southern foods. His reputation among southerners seems to have started with his unique take on turnip greens, which gain a hefty bite from plenty of hot pepper. Cleverly named versions of southern dishes may provoke a smile: hoppin' Juan, sloppy Jos� tacos, Waco tacos. Some southern and Mexican staples are in fact virtually interchangeable, whether it's cracklings and chicharr�ns or bacon fat and lard. Many of Hernandez's inventions simply add some fresh chopped jalape�os to a southern standard, such as his shrimp and grits or his slightly spicier version of the ubiquitous southern pimento cheese.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
Starred review from April 15, 2018
Hernandez is the executive chef of Taqueria del Sol, an Atlanta-based restaurant chain with locations in Georgia and Tennessee. Writing with author and editor Puckett (Eat Drink Delta), he shares more than 125 recipes that highlight the similarities between Southern and Mexican cuisine. As with Asha Gomez's My Two Souths, which gave Southern dishes a South Indian twist, this cookbook features innovative foods and surprising flavor combinations. Readers will have no trouble whipping up recipes such as Fritos chilaquiles, Creole red beans and rice burritos, tequila-mango smoothie, and sweet potato cheesecake, which are written for home kitchens and rely on readily available ingredients. VERDICT A stellar debut imbued with Hernandez's infectious excitement for cooking.
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.