Make Ahead

Masa is the essence of Mexico. It is the foundation of Mexican cooking. In Oaxaca, a lot of families still make their own nixtamal at home to supply their daily masa consumption. Nixtamal is the process of treating dried corn with an alkaline solution to make it more nutritious. Slaking lime—also known as pickling lime, a naturally occurring mineral compound—has been used for thousands of years for this process. After a night of soaking, the nixtamalized corn is ground and transformed into masa. This technique has been passed from generation to generation, especially in Oaxaca. Every night before my mom goes to bed, she nixtamalizes a batch of corn so she can make fresh masa the next morning. It’s part of her nightly routine.    The trickiest part of making masa might be grinding it, and for that I recommend a tabletop wet stone mill or a hand-cranked wet grinder. I like Premier’s Small Wonder 1.5-liter tabletop wet grinder.    Believe me, there is nothing more fulfilling than making your own masa at home.

This smoky chipotle and tomatillo salsa is an excellent dipping sauce for crudités or tortilla chips, or you can spoon it on top of tamales. You can use more chiles for a spicier sauce.

Barley flour, cornmeal, and a hint of grapefruit juice make this easy pie crust extra flavorful. Try it with this Blueberry-Nectarine Lattice Pie.

The underlying notes of vanilla and nutmeg—found in Coca-Cola—are layered with piquant aromatics and tangy tomato ketchup to produce a barbecue sauce that's remarkably dynamic. 

This barbecue sauce recipe combines bright ginger and sharp Dijon mustard.

Chances are, if you're not Oaxaqueño and grew up in this last generation in Mexico or the United States, you’ve probably been taught to think that pork fat like aciento—Oaxacan-style chicharrón paste—is not good for you, and that you should always cook and eat things made with a plant-based oil instead. It’s normal to think this way. That is, until you go to Oaxaca and see that aciento is a way of life and that a lot of elders live to be more than one hundred years old eating the stuff on a daily basis. You’ll also realize that it is amazingly flavorful and really completes a lot of masa-based Oaxacan dishes such as tlayudas, memelas, empanadas, and chochoyotes. Think of it as a Oaxacan brown butter. If you do it right, it should taste nutty and toasty, not like lard or like fat. I also understand that a lot of people may not have the time to properly render chicharrón into a paste, so this shortcut version using olive oil is much quicker and tastes almost as good. If you can’t find or don’t have access to fresh chicharrón, American-style pork rinds also work well.

In this herby make-ahead brunch dish, French onion dip meets savory bread pudding. Put the strata together the night before, then bake at breakfast time.

This Jalapeño Ranch is gonna kick up all kinds of taco creations and take veggies and dip to a new level in your life.

This cake has the fluffy, so-light-it-could-float texture of angel food cake, with a touch of egg yolk for richness. Tahini brings pure sesame flavor and a lining of sesame seeds adds a bonus level of crunch.

There is a way to have your macaroni fix in the freezer: a custard-style baked mac ’n’ cheese. Instead of a cream-based sauce, this one uses eggs and béchamel to help bind a very cheesy filling with the noodles. The pimentos help to cut the richness with a little bit of acidity.

One great thing about dumplings is that you can use practically anything in the filling—and you can pan-fry them, or boil them, or deep-fry them.

For dense hand-pulled noodles, you’re going to want the sauce to be saltier and spicier, balancing out the thick wheat noodles with extra aromatics for depth of flavor.

Hot pepper is notably absent from this mixture—unlike curry powder from Madras. Trinidadians like to add fresh hot pepper to dishes, according to taste.

Creole cream cheese is Louisiana's answer to ricotta or burrata cheese. Traditionally, it’s eaten with cream, sugar, and fruit spooned over the top or used as a substitute for yogurt.

This savory pie calls for roasting tomatoes to concentrate their flavor, then layering them with two kinds of cheese atop a garlic-butter crust for a result as dramatic as it is delicious.

Bound together with honey and nut butter, these just-sweet-enough bars are sturdy enough to throw in a beach bag and substantial enough to power you through til sunset.

Unlike a strongly acidic lemonade or limeade, this sumac syrup is tart but mild. The saffron and cardamom are pounded to release their color and flavors into the hot syrup.

Peanut butter, jelly, and buttery crackers, now a in no-churn ice cream pie form. Any nut or seed butter, jam or jelly, will work.

No ice cream machine required for this frozen treat, as the cream is whipped before being frozen.

No ice cream machine required for this frozen treat, as the cream is whipped before being frozen.