The night before a car-camping feast, I marinated flank steak in OJ, lime juice, cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, beer, and a host of toasted spices. The next day, after a flop in the river and some afternoon fishing, I set the steaks onto a cast-iron pan over the campfire. We had tortillas from Seattle’s El Paisano Rosticeria y Cocina, a blenderized salsa verde, pickled red onions, and refried black beans with avocado leaves. As the sun set, I had two related thoughts. One was that I felt pretty certain we had the best meal in the campground that night, perhaps even that month. The other was that I wanted a lot more of that citrus and cider vinegar combination in my life.
For those of you looking to break out of a multiyear grilling rut that involved few vegetables and a lot of thick chops, ribeyes, briskets, and smoked meat, a new book by Oaxaca-born chef Bricia Lopez and coauthor Javier Cabral—Asada, The Art of Mexican-Style Grilling—is a very welcome change.
Lopez runs the famed Los Angeles restaurant Guelaguetza, and Cabral is the editor in chief of the food and culture website L.A. Taco. The book is a Mexican menu and an LA vibe, and the authors, along with photographer Quentin Bacon, have impeccable credentials. A few years back, Lopez and Cabral wrote the outstanding Oaxaca: Home Cooking From the Heart of Mexico, easily one of my top five cookbooks since it came out in 2019.
For what you might call the “lost ribeye decades,” which started in the late 1980s, finding a barbecue cookbook in the United States written by someone who wasn’t a white dude was near impossible. Around the grill, Black pitmasters, women, and especially women of color were not being published, with incredibly few exceptions. (Barbecue historian Adrian Miller has an excellent article about this in The Washington Post.)
For a sense of what we’ve been missing all this time, may I suggest Lopez’s lamb barbacoa on page 96? Inspired by a dish she had growing up at the Tlacolula Sunday market in Oaxaca, it’s coated in a rub made by liquefying two onions and a head of garlic in a blender with guajillo chiles and a few handfuls of herbs and spices—like cinnamon stick, anise seed, cumin, and oregano—before marinating it overnight. The next day, the marinated lamb is wrapped in banana leaves like an Oaxacan tamale and then tucked inside a Dutch oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
After two unattended hours, you lift the lid, peel away the banana leaf, and shred the meat, which is bathing in its own sauce. You’ll want a tortilla to help you get a handle on all that deliciousness, and perhaps a squirt of the lime, cilantro, and onion “con todo” salsa, before preparing yourself to float away in a state of bliss.
While the book is what you might call meat forward, it is also quite vegetarian friendly. Pipian is a dip for grilled veggies—or anything really—and the version included here is worth the purchase price alone. For it, I grilled a habanero, garlic, red bell pepper, tomatoes, and sourdough bread, then blitzed it all in my food processor with oil, almonds, salt, and vinegar to delicious effect.
There are Lopez’s takes on food you’d expect, or at least hope for, like guacamoles and bean-and-rice dishes, but she also layers on the fun with fruit salad with chile-lime salt, and a cheese and chicharrón board. For smaller dishes that turn the volume to 11, there is cauliflower and jalapeño in escabeche, esquites, avocado oil tortillas, grilled nopales, and a whole chapterful of salsas. If you want to know what’s in the “naked taco,” check out the potentially suggestive photograph on page 177.
There is also a very helpful introductory section that gets into pantry items, offers a dried chile explainer, and includes guides to both Mexican dairy and chicharrón. There’s even a section for asada cuts. When you’re at the carniceria, ask for the flanken beef costillitas, which Lopez calls “the MVP of carne asada cuts” because they are forgiving, tender, and affordable.
The book isn’t perfect, but it’s close. That lamb recipe has a liquid that’s reserved in the first paragraph but never reappears. The salt in the ingredient list for refried beans never shows up in the procedure, but your taste buds will tell you what to do. Similarly, though this is not a fault, it’ll be a bit aspirational for beginners. The almonds in the pipian, for example, are “toasted in a skillet on the stove top” and if you need further instructions, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Still, those are tiny quibbles about a fantastic book. To help get over them, could I suggest making your own elotes? Ears of unhusked corn are grilled alongside a foil packet with a head of garlic and a tablespoon of butter tucked inside. That garlic is added to mayo, coriander, and salt “by squeezing the head like you would squeeze a lime.” Each cooked ear gets slathered with that goodness before being coated with cotija and a dusting of chile powder. I made this on barbacoa night, where it threatened to steal the show and temporarily rendered my food-loving niece mute with pleasure.
This is not a book for your friend with a temperature-controlled smoker who likes to stick a thermometer into everything and has five different kinds of wood chips. This is a book for your adventurous friend who loves to cook, eat, and suck down a michelada while manning a Weber kettle and charming a steady stream of guests. Lopez and Cabral created something magical a few years back with their Oaxaca cookbook, and with Asada, they’ve done it again, conjuring a beautiful vibe centered around the grill.
