Advanced search

Rick Bayless, chef, travels to Mexico, samples food, and then returns to his kitchen to teach you how to cook the same dishes.

Rick Bayless is proud to share these sensational recipes with you. This curated collection includes his all-time favorite traditional Mexican dishes, meals you can prepare on the fly, classic tacos and salsa, memorable cocktails, and more.

The movie tells the story of Abigael Edades who returns to her Philippine hometown from her five-year stint as a nurse in Canada. Her town mates rousingly welcome her as a hero, the crass moniker ascribed by the government to hundreds of thousands of Filipinos working abroad. She finds her family in tatters, her parents estranged and living apart and her brother Jepoy living the life of drugs. But she basks in the welcome of her mother and youngest brother Noel and the devotion of her boyfriend, who proposes marriage. Her happiness is short-lived. She is diagnosed with SARS and contaminates Noel. They cause a national scare, are quarantined in Manila and are shunned by their own townspeople and the municipal government. Even her boyfriend leaves her. The hero becomes a heel. "Just a month after my return, my views on life and the people around me have irrevocably changed," she says at the start of the movie.

Call it coincidence or call it fate, but Mexico's national colors-red, white and green-wind up at the center of a whole family of emblematic, home-style "comfort food" dishes, known simply as "a la Mexicana."

Succulent meat, slowly cooked in pits lined with smoldering embers is the stuff of barbecue dreams.

Every culture has its soothing, soulful soup, and in Mexico, it's Caldo de Pollo, a light chicken broth flavored with aromatic vegetables and herbs.

Rick is out to prove a tasty point about ceviche, the traditional Mexican seafood salad marinated in lime and chiles: it's so ancient, so elemental and so easy, you don't even need a kitchen to make it.

What makes these stuffed chiles in a golden souffle batter so special? Rick takes us into the Frontera kitchen to show us firsthand.

Fruit is everywhere in Mexico-sweet, colorful and refreshing. And it's sold ripe, so the lush smell of tropical fruit is always in the air.

Rick takes us out to the garden to discover just what a tomatillo is and isn't (hint-it's not very closely related to a tomato), with tips on how to grow tomatillos, what to look for when buying them and how to judge their ripeness.

Gleefully dispelling the notion that tacos are crispy shells jammed with ground beef and shredded lettuce, Rick takes us on a journey in search of the real thing.

Authentic Mexican food is fresher, more complex, and especially lighter than most Americans realize. Case in point: two classic Mexican preparations, Mojo and Escabeche

Rice is everywhere in Mexico: as the second course in traditional comida, as a beautiful accompaniment to seafood, and more. But it was not always this way. Join Rick as he traces the history of this relative newcomer to the Mexican diet.

Every culture has its small bites-sushi, dim sum, tapas, mezze. But in Mexico, these flavorful tidbits fall into a different kind of category: "antojitos," the foods you crave.

Homey tacos de cazuela-soft corn tortillas rolled around fillings simmered slowly in earthenware pots-are the soul of Mexican comfort food. And nothing makes them more appealing than just-baked tortillas.

Accompanied by his 8-year-old daughter, Lanie, Rick pays homage to the magic of melted cheese.

The word "enchilada" means "in chile," and in Mexico, the most beloved version is a street snack: a corn tortilla dipped in chile sauce that are a far cry from the limp, stuffed tortillas swimming in red sauce and molten cheese in the U.S.

Tamales are sold by the steamer-full on street corners and plazas, prepared by the hundreds for parties, eaten as a snack, and are altogether universally loved. When it comes to rolling your own, making tamales is easier than you think.

Rick takes us to the port of Veracruz for a look at the city's most famous contribution to Mexican cooking, a fittingly Mediterranean fish preparation known simply as "a la Veracruzana" that features a whole fish baked in a tangy sauce.

How do you turn a backyard cookout into party to remember? At Rick's place, you raise the stakes and get the guests involved in the cooking.

Chiles are the hot, spicy peppers that are used solely to make Mexican food so incendiary, right? Wrong. Rick deftly debunks the most common myths about the role of chiles in Mexican cooking.

An exploration of the deceptively complex and varied world of beans, one of Mexico's most ubiquitous staple foods.

We find Rick somewhere in the jungles of Mexico, pondering the great questions of the ancient world-like, "what was for breakfast?"

Standing amid the excavated layers of ancient civilizations in the Templo Mayor, right in the heart of modern Mexico City, Rick points out that Mexican cooking has always been a product of diverse cultural influences