The Latin Road Home: Savoring the Foods of Ecuador, Spain, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru

Product Description Spanning cultures and continents, The Latin Road Home is a look back at the many food traditions that have shaped Garces' culinary life. Beginning in Ecuador, ancestral home to his family and the foods nearest to his heart, Garces celebrates the traditional recipes of his childhood. The book makes its way through Spain, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru―extraordinary cuisines Garces has come to know, love, and master. He shares not only recipes, but colorful memories of local cultures and insights into their unique ingredients and techniques. The cookbook features over 100 recipes tailored to the home cook, accompanied by over 100 food and travel photographs that truly immerse the reader. Each chapter features a different country with menus highlighting Garces' takes on both mainstays of home cooking and popular street foods. The book is full of recipes for bright salads and ceviches, comforting stews, hearty beans, and tender braised meats. When a celebratory feast is in order, Jose's party menus are full of hors d'oeuvres, cocktails, and impressive fare for a kind of night where cooking becomes a part of the festivities. Recipes are titled in both English and Spanish and stay true to their roots. Soulful, vibrant Latin dishes such as these will surely become the home-cooked staples of readers' kitchens: Green Plantain Empanadas with Braised Chicken, Grilled Spring Onions with Almond Sauce, Fried Stuffed Chiles, Braised Beef Stew with Red Beans, Pan-Roasted Shrimp with Tequila, and Salt-Baked Fish with Ginger Oil. From the gastronomic powerhouse that is Spain to the seafood-rich shores of fiery Peru, Garces showcases the heart of Latin cooking with dishes that are at once sophisticated and elemental. Review With this exciting book, home cooks can join Jose, one of America's most exciting chefs, on his journey back and forth across the Atlantic, cooking some of the best dishes from the Old World and New. -- Jose Andres The Latin Road Home is Chef Garces' passionate, personal introduction to Latin cuisine. His love of unpretentious home cooking and his superb culinary techniques are beautifully integrated in each recipe. -- Chef Masaharu Morimoto This beauty of a book is Philadelphia-based chef Jose Garces's love letter to Latin home cooking. Organized into five lavishly photographed chapters-one each for Ecuador (Garces's ancestral homeland), Spain, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru-the book explores the foods that have nourished Garces and shaped his growth as a chef. In each chapter, Garces o?ffers four dinner menus, featuring tempting authentic regional dishes such as Ecuadorian Chicken and Rice Soup with Achiote, and Seafood Vermicelli Paella (yes, paella made with pasta, not rice) from Spain's Costa del Sol. He also includes extra recipes for "essentials" of each cuisine like Ecuadorian empanadas, sweet Cuban-style espresso, and hearty Mexican corn tamales. Throughout the book, Garces remains true to his mission of celebrating home cooking, and the recipes are consistently doable and unpretentious. It's filled with the sort of comforting family-friendly roasts, stews, and salads that we all love-and it's a great read to boot. -- Kimberly Masibay, Fine Cooking, October 2012 Garces' recipes are his take on the classics, whether it's a twist added by his relatives or an upscale reinvention for one of his restaurants. The book is also beautiful, with photography that stands out as a refreshing pop of color (and vegetables) in a season dominated by food photography in muted shades of brown. -- Paula Forbes, Eater, October 2012 The cookbook serves as a Latin cooking primer, paying homage to the countries where Garces found his cooking soul: his ancestral home of Ecuador, as well as Spain, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru. Garces traveled extensively through those countries, absorbing then interpreting their cuisines for the restaurants he opened here. -- Maureen Fitzgerald, Food Editor, The Philadelphia Inquirer, October