Thomasina Miers - Wahaca - Mexican Food at Home

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First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company

Text Copyright Thomasina Miers 2012
Food Photography Copyright Malou Burger
Except pages 56 and 234 Tara Fisher

The right of Thomasina Miers to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978 1 444 75692 0

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Thomasina Miers first arrived in Mexico aged 18, and the country and its food had such an impact that she went back to live there. She opened up a cocktail bar in Mexico City and used her free time to travel the country and cook with some of Mexicos top chefs. After returning to London and winning BBC2s MasterChef in 2005, Thomasina worked for six months with Skye Gyngell at Petersham Nurseries in Richmond.

Thomasina and Mark Selby soon opened their first Mexican street food cantina, Wahaca, which promptly won the Observer Food Monthlys best cheap eats award. Wahaca has since been included in the Cool Brands list, and was voted Londons best Mexican. Wahaca has now has sites across the south-east of Britain, including Covent Garden, Soho, Bluewater, Canary Wharf, White City and Stratford.

Thomasina is the co-editor of Soup Kitchen and the author of Cook, Wild Gourmets and Mexican Food Made Simple. She lives in London with her husband and daughter.

Contents

From Mexico

I went to Mexico aged eighteen and fell for the country and its food with all the fervour of a first love. Everything dazzled me. The place was alive and pulsing with energy and the cuisine was a world away from what I had expected; until then, I thought that TexMex was Mexican food and that all tequila tasted cheap and nasty.

What I discovered was a world of incredible colour and flavour: 200 types of chilli, hundreds of varieties of corn, strange fruit, and wild herbs and greens whose names I couldnt even pronounce. I learnt that Mexico was the birthplace of many familiar ingredients: avocados, beans, heirloom tomatoes, pumpkins, courgettes, chocolate and even vanilla pods, which grow in the rainforests of Veracruz. I found it all impossibly romantic. Here was a cuisine as regional as Indian, as diverse as Chinese and as fresh as Italian. Here was a country whose people were obsessed by good food and good eating, no matter how rich or poor. I returned home and waited for the penny to drop waited for someone to open the first real Mexican restaurant.

Nine years on, there was a Mexican food stall in Portobello cooking incredible, authentic food, and a couple of bars serving decent tequila. That was it. Before my memories could fade altogether, I went back to Mexico and got a job opening and running a cocktail bar in Mexico City, determined to discover what the country (and its gastronomy) was all about. I used my free time to travel around. I learnt how the Mexicans employ a simple toolbox of ingredients, plus spices and herbs such as cloves, cinnamon, coriander and oregano, to create layers of flavour. I set about unraveling the secrets to the great, complex moles (sauces) and slow-cooked meats. I found exciting variations in regional dishes, and incredible ingredients indigenous to specific states. Almost a year later, I returned home determined to do something with that knowledge.

to London

The trouble was, I had plenty of enthusiasm but no money. But then I entered MasterChef (and won it!), got a job at Petersham Nurseries restaurant and, shortly thereafter, met Mark Selby through a mutual friend (thanks, Georgie Cleeve!). Things were looking up. Fiercely bright and bursting with energy, Mark had spent his time since university working in banks, where, through his contact with restaurateurs, entrepreneurs and businessmen, he had learnt what governs the success and failure of small businesses. Mark is creative, meticulous and passionate. But the really amazing thing was that he was as crazy about Mexico as me. He had spent some time travelling around the country and, like me, he loved the food; also like me, he wanted to start up a restaurant.

We went back to Mexico together to explore our options, to look at cantinas, stalls and markets and to revisit the food. We had never eaten so much in our lives! In that ten-day trip we ate several breakfasts each morning, followed by a couple of lunches and then, occasionally, dinner on top. So anxious were we to try all the places on our list that we did not let up for a minute. With the generous hospitality that is a given in Mexico, everywhere we went food was lavished on us by chefs and restaurateurs. At night we collapsed into sweaty, dizzy heaps, plagued by our full tummies and overwhelmed by the different dishes, places and people we had seen. We knew that we were onto something. If we were this blown away by the incredible food, surely the rest of Britain would be too?

We considered the challenge. Some ingredients would be impossible to find back home. And selecting a menu would be tricky there were so many styles of cooking to choose from, let alone recipes. We worked out that, although our menu would come from recipes found all over Mexico, what really inspired us was the food markets we first discovered in Oaxaca (Wa-ha-ca) and the way the stallholders worked together as a team to make the marketplace work. And we loved the spontaneity with which fresh ingredients were transformed into incredible-tasting street food right before our eyes. We loved the nations approach to eating, which was invariably a shared experience that made up the most important part of the day. Although it was taken incredibly seriously, food never had to cost a fortune. Good food in Mexico was accessible, so from the very beginning we wanted to make our restaurant affordable and fun. We also wanted to balance healthy eating with hearty eating, using nutritious ingredients to give our customers everything they could want from a fully balanced diet. Our corn tortillas are gluten-free and our black beans are full of complex carbohydrates and protein. Our tostadas, guacamole, taquitos, quesadillas and salads are made fresh every day.