Birrias: 60 Recipes from Traditional to Modern

Learn from a birrias master how to make your Mexican home cooking more varied, exciting, and richly flavorful than ever before.

Traditionally, birrias are the beloved stews served in Mexico on all special occasions, such as weddings, quinceaneras (girls’ coming-of-age celebrations), and family reunions. They are made with a meat--traditionally beef, pork, or goat--slow-cooked in an adobo sauce of chile peppers, garlic, vinegar, and herbs, then served with tortillas for dipping. Food writer, cookbook author, and chef Jesse Valenciana is the virtuoso of birrias. He reveals in this book the luscious secrets of birrias--both in their traditional forms and in their incredible new varieties.

In their recent revival, evident in the best Mexican restaurants everywhere, birrias are getting even more versatile and delectable. They’re now made with all kinds of meats and proteins and in vegetarian versions. The biggest change is that birrias have become an in-demand filling or topping for all sorts of other Mexican foods, from tacos to tamales and beyond.

In Birrias, Jesse serves up:

• A dozen recipes for the traditional birrias he learned from his Mexican and Mexican-American grandparents
• Nearly 50 more recipes for the hip, creative, and soul-satisfying new ways to make and use birrias
• Techniques for making everything from birrias tacos, enchiladas, burritos, and quesadillas to birrias sandwiches, wraps, salads, soups, appetizers, and more
• A special bonus chapter featuring a handful of Jesse’s birrias collaborations with well-known chefs--all easy to make at home--such as the ＂Appalachian Birria＂ he developed with star chef Sean Brock of Nashville.

If your Mexican cooking is stuck in a rut of ground-beef tacos and cheese enchiladas, you will discover an exciting new world of flavors and dinner ideas in these pages.

Jesse Valenciana, as a regular reporter and columnist for The Takeout, is one of the premier food journalists focused on Mexican cuisine and other Hispanic foods of the Americas. He also presides over Nashville’s hippest catering and pop-up company, The Secret Bodega. A veteran of several prestigious restaurant kitchens and a former marketing executive with Goose Island Brewery, he has appeared on The Today Show and on local television segments in Chicago and Nashville, among other cities. His experience with birrias spans from eating his grandmother’s traditional birria every Sunday as a child to collaborating with leading chefs on novel birria creations today.