Cocina Puerto Rico: Recipes from My Abuela’s Kitchen to Yours

Chef Castro’s lively and wide-ranging debut collection pays homage to her Puerto Rican roots and her grandmother’s home cooking. After a brief history of the Taíno, Spanish, and African influences on the island’s cuisine, Castro covers equipment and pantry essentials, including a useful guide to viandas, the starchy fruits and tubers such as breadfruit, yuca, and chayote, that serve as the “backbone” of Puerto Rican cooking. Foundational seasonings and sauces include homemade adobo and sofrito, while beverages include horchata and cafecito. There’s classic pega’o, or crunchy, sticky bottom rice, alongside Castro’s unique spin on arroz con pollo, a dish that secured her win on the cooking competition show Beat Bobby Flay. She also shares a recipe for grilled skirt steak or pork tenderloin that took the top prize on Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen. Seafood abounds, from crispy grouper nuggets to saucy crab stew, while plantains and coconut also make frequent appearances. Castro provides useful descriptions for those unfamiliar with the dishes at hand—saltfish serenade is a “down-to-earth Latin cousin of a tuna Nicoise salad”—and shares personal connections (adding beer to black beans is her mother’s “special touch”). Those nostalgic for their home cuisine and those new to Puerto Rican fare will be equally taken with this expansive collection. (Feb.)