Alex Stupak - Tacos: Recipes and Provocations

Copyright 2015 by Empelln Holdings LLC and Jordana Rothman

Photographs copyright 2015 by Evan Sung

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stupak, Alex.

Tacos: recipes and provocations / Alex Stupak and Jordana Rothman; photographs by Evan Sung.First edition. Includes index.

1. Tacos. 2. Tortillas. 3. Cooking, Mexican. I. Rothman, Jordana. II. Title.

TX836.S78 2015

641.84dc23 2015006214

ISBN9780553447293

eBook ISBN9780553447309

Cover design by Marysarah Quinn

Cover photograph by Evan Sung

v4.1_r1

a

FOR ALL THE MEXICAN COOKS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE BORDER
WITH RESPECT AND GRATITUDE

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PROVOCATIONS

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L ets get this out of the way right up front. Im a white boy from suburban Massachusetts where Old El Paso taco nights were mothers milk. I loved that stuff.

In fact, I wouldnt even consider Mexican food that didnt come with a spice pack and a sleeve of crispy shells until long after Id graduated culinary school and settled into a kitchen trajectory that had nothing to do with tacos. In 2005, I was clocking ninety hours a week in the pastry kitchen at Alinea in Chicago. Id fallen hard for methylcellulose and xanthan gumstaples of the modernist cuisine tool beltand I regarded Albert Adris first pastry book, Los Postres de el Bulli, as sacred writ. The early days of Alinea were creatively grueling. And like a Dostoyevsky student who offsets all the Slavic gloom with a smutty beach read, I spent my downtime chasing a deliverance from haute cuisine.

I lived in a lousy walk-up in Lincoln Park with Lauren Resler, the woman who would eventually see fit to marry me, and on our days off she and I would explore the citys ethnic neighborhoods: the Polish Triangle along Milwaukee Avenue; Indo-Pak street food on the North Side; andour favoritesthe Mexican enclaves of Pilsen and Little Village. Along 26th Street, you couldnt walk five feet without tripping over a masa factory. Wed find ingredients there that were completely alien to us at the time: guaje seeds and spiny chayote, nopales, avocado leaves, and Oaxacan chiles. Id bring this stuff home and comb through the index of Rick Baylesss Mexican Kitchen to figure out how to use it.

Cracking the countrys cuisine soon became my off-the-clock obsession. Laurens mother is Mexican and shed grown up with some of these flavors, but we were going deep at home. Wed toast broken vermicelli in oil and cook it down in broth and chorizo for sopa seca de fideo. Wed pulverize tomatillo, cilantro, and serrano chiles into a bright green salsa verde and eat it with chilaquiles. Wed simmer black beans with epazote and chipotle, or stuff shredded chicken into a tamal de cazuela and bake it into a crusty, savory pie. We were mad for this stuff.

Then, on a visit to Los Angeles, I tasted my first real-deal tortilla and the earth moved just a little. We took a trip to La Parrilla, a taco place in East L.A. that opened in the late seventies. The decor was demented in the way only great taquerias are allowed to be demented: psychedelic mayhem with Mexican flag bric-a-brac, paper garlands, and Christmas lights dangling over sticky vinyl booths. But right there in the center of the dining room was the heart of the place. A comalthe flat griddle traditionally used to prepare tortillasand a circle of cooks in frilly aprons tending it with the kind of calm, muscle-memory efficiency that tells you theyve been at it for a lifetime. They would roll masa with their hands, flatten the balls into thin rounds in a tortilla press, and slide them onto the griddle. They would then scrape the tortillas from the comal and slip them, still hot, into cloth-lined baskets.

Ive had three defining moments as a cook: the first time I got to touch a black truffle; the first time I made a stable foam; and the first time I tasted a freshly made tortilla at La Parrilla. It was elastic and gently blistered. Earthy and supple with the flavor of toasted corn. It tasted ancient. That tortilla got under my skin. And the more I learned about Mexican food, the more I sensed that what I loved about it didnt come from the same wellspring that makes things like nacho cheese Crunchwrap Supremes a cultural phenom in America.

A year later, I had moved to New York and was heading up pastry at Wylie Dufresnes legendary wd~50. The hallmarks of molecular food had begun to penetrate mainstream consciousness. Journalists called me daily looking for word on the latest gastro-trickery coming out of my corner of the kitchen. Investors called, too. It would have been easy enough to peel off from wd~50 and open my own temple of progressive cooking. But I knew if I piggybacked on the work of my mentorsguys like Wylie, Grant Achatz, and Ken Oringer at Bostons Clio, where I began my careerId see it as a personal failure. I wouldnt have made a statement, wouldnt have ruffled any feathers. I needed to do something provocative.

I thought back to those days I spent experimenting with chiles in Chicago. I thought of how much I liked that world, and of how challenging it would be to course-correct at this point in my careerto go from pastry to savory, to take a deep dive from modernist fine dining into the traditions of Mexican cooking. But Ive never been interested in being reasonable. Thats no fun. So I left wd~50 and began hatching plans to open a taqueria. My peers scratched their heads at what seemed like a professional reversal. I explained I wanted to cut off one arm to force myself to learn to use the other. But it would be a while before I got the hang of it.

Empelln Taqueria opened on March 21, 2011. I remember it as the day I realized I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I thought tacos would be an easy entry point for me as a chef: a tortilla, some salsa, a filling. Simple enough, until the first night of service arrived and the complexity of a well-made taco became maddeningly clear. All at once, I understood that the life span of a warm tortilla is stupidly briefthat making sure a taco arrives at the table with some fight left in it is a sophisticated orchestration of timing and planning; that I was not at all prepared for this. We were slammed with mile-long tickets: 19 tacos for a four-top, each requiring its own, intricate prep. The tortilla station couldnt keep up, and we were instantly in the weeds. I had invited my father and a journalist to join us in the kitchen on opening night, and both of them looked on in abject horror as we went down in a blaze of expletives. Tacos, man. Who knew?