Alfredo Garcia | Let's Make It! A Mexican-American Culinary Adventure

0:07Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Emma, bringing you this episode with chef and content creator Alfredo Garcia. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash Talks at Google. Whether you're looking for the best pico de gallo to bring to carne asada or a fresh twist on tres leches cake, try a little bit of matcha powder, Alfredo's new book has got you covered. Let's Make It, a Mexican-American culinary adventure, reflects on the dual influences on Alfredo's cooking with Mexican-inspired versions of American classics.

0:53Alfredo has been a full-time content creator since 2021. Before that, he was the private chef for multiple Major League Baseball players. His love of cooking is inspired by the strong women in his family, especially his mother, grandmother, and aunts. Here is Alfredo Garcia. Let's make it a Mexican-American culinary adventure.

1:24We are so excited to have you in our kitchen. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Oh my goodness. It's a beautiful kitchen. It's a beautiful kitchen. Thanks for making a stop in our beautiful kitchen in Seattle. No, thank you. Before we kick this off for real, I'll just remind you that we're going to have some time for Q &A at the end. It can go in any direction. Okay, tell us, first of all, why chilequiles is your favorite breakfast food? It's my favorite because you can have it a million different ways, like back to back to back. Like you don't always have to have it the same way. You can have it with like salsa verde or salsa roja or like you can have it with mole.

2:00It's just like a different experience every time you're eating them. so that's why I love them. Nice. It's just delicious. And what does it look like on a plate for those of us who don't love it? It's just crispy tortilla chips and then you simmer them in whatever type of salsa you're using. And then that's pretty much like the standard way of having it. You can serve them with some refried beans, a fried egg on top with a runny yolk, some crema, queso fresco, pickled onions. You can add any type of protein you want to them. It's just like... Any way you want to go. Like whatever you're craving, just add it in there and it's delicious and like yummy goopy good yeah it's like they're crunchy but then they start getting a little soggy like the more you get in there it's just like like best of both worlds that yeah awesome that sounds delicious so you grew up in a home where cooking was like a strong vibe yeah my mom was a stay-at-home mom so every time when we'd get home from school she was always cooking for us um she would be cooking i would be watching food networks because it's like I was always surrounded by food.

3:03We rarely we would only go out to eat on like special occasions and stuff like that or on weekends. So it's like always eating at home. Nice. Yeah. And there's a lot of that. Like you can do this to homey vibe in your cookbook. Yeah, totally. Because I'm not a professionally trained chef. So all of my cooking is very home cooking inspired. Like it's not really hard things. It's just things that I've learned myself, like either from watching my mom, watching Food Network or watching YouTube videos and stuff like that. So it's all self-taught pretty much. You even make mole sound easy in the cookbook, which we'll get back to.

3:39I was like, maybe it can be done. It is easy. So, OK, tell me about the first job you had as a chef. First job as a chef. It was maybe like a very short lived, but I worked in a food truck on campus in college for a couple of days. Like not even I don't even think it was two full weeks, but it was fun and I liked it. And like I liked the rush of like, OK, like this order just came in. You have to prepare it. So that was my first time ever, like working in any type of food atmosphere. And I loved it. That's awesome. And then we fast forward. You got your first job with an MLB player, Jamie Garcia.

4:18and sounds like you were from the book sounds like you were like a little nervous at the beginning you had to turn to the YouTube for some help it was fun I had never cooked for someone that's like a major league baseball player luckily a lot of the food that he wanted was super simple like lots of proteins veggies and like some type of starch but his baseball agent was coming for dinner so he obviously wanted like a fancier dinner and we went to Whole Foods. We got like everything. And then he also got lobster tails. I'm like, I've never cooked a lobster tail. So there I was like on YouTube, like looking up how to cook a lobster tail.

5:00I'm going to cook a lobster tail. And luckily almost all of them came out right. One of them was still a little raw, but it's fine. That was a test one in the kitchen. We're all still alive. Here we are. Yep. That is awesome. So then you worked a bunch of different jobs while you were also cooking. You were a door-to-door salesman in Chicago. You worked in a construction company. You, like, kept a commitment to cooking alongside, like, having to be an adult. And then the pandemic hit, and it was this weird moment of opportunity for you. Yeah, when COVID hit, I was, like most people, working from home.

5:35So I was cooking more than usual. And at first, I should have started recording everything right when it started. But at first, I was just taking pictures of the food and posting it on Instagram stories. Um, and then randomly, I just like I also refused to download TikTok. I just wasn't a fan of the app at first. And then I just started and like I was I didn't take it serious at first. I was just doing it for fun. And then when I got my first partnership almost a year into it, I was like, OK, I can actually make money doing this. And that's when I started taking it serious, posting cooking videos twice a day.

6:12And it just like slowly took off in there. and so tell us about the cardi b moment the avocado dip uh it's a very it was a sleeper hit at first i posted the video and then the cardi b moment didn't happen until like a month and a half two months later where i was having game night with my cousins and we were just finishing up our food about to start playing the game and i started getting all these like spams with like cardi b fan page accounts because they were all reposting the video and i first i thought it was spam just because there was like tons and tons of notifications until one of my aunts texted me she's like hey cardi b just like made your recipe like it's on tiktok and yeah ever since then it's like people still make it every day to this point i get tagged on it every day people go viral just making the dip because of cardi b it's pretty cool yeah so it's like this whole like network of cardi b watchers and recipe makers that's pretty cool so i'm also noticing a theme here first you thought the cardi b fans were spam and then you were telling me this story about a white house invitation you thought was a phishing scam yeah so unpack that so this was maybe almost two years ago i got in a random email from the white house to go to an event for the flame and hot movie and i the email was kind of scammy the link makes you like to rsvp uh you have to put in like basically your entire life's information including your social security number so i thought it was a spam and like luckily i knew someone that i had previously gone to the white house so i asked them and they confirmed that it was legit so that's when i went to the white house you are indeed invited to the white house yeah she said congratulations you've been invited to the white house so that was fun it was fun so these are the twists and turns of becoming like a viral sensation yeah just you know navigating is it real is it not is it real so now that you have this beautiful cookbook which i don't know if anybody's seen it yet here's the beautiful cookbook does it really feel real you can like touch it and stuff yeah for the longest when i i knew the book was happening it didn't feel real because like you're working on the book for like two years you don't have a physical book until like two years after so it was hard to believe at first but even now sometimes i'm like i walk into some like oh like that's my book in barnes noble or like it's crazy that's but it's a real thing now all right let's talk more about the book because There's so many luscious, lovely things in here.

8:43So the first thing I will tell my friends here about this book is that this is like made for Googlers. He's put food in a matrix, y 'all. There's like five or six food matrices in here. Tell us about that design idea. I'm going to find one while you talk. So the design idea, I didn't know how it was going to look visually in the book. But that's one of my favorite things about cooking where it's like you can make one big batch of things. like this is birria and like the previous page is like the actual recipe for the birria and it's like one of those things that's like not necessarily hard to make but it's so easy to make in big batches and you can easily freeze it for a later use so it's like you make a big batch of birria and you can make all of these other things like pizza chilaquiles grilled cheese with that one base recipe.

9:33Oh, yeah. They all are delicious. Those days were rough when we were photographing the book because it was like extra, extra food we had to make. Oh, yeah, that would be a big day. Everyone loved it. Like, it's different. That is not a bad day to be on your crew, though. Oh, no. We have plenty of food to go. The other thing I love about the food matrix idea in here is they all have these instructions about how they're meant to be quick and dirty. No measurements. No measurements. Tell us more. I feel like if you cook at home, like most of the times you don't measure anything. So it's just like, just add a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

10:07Like it doesn't need to be exact to be perfect. It's just like, if you like something spicier, use more salsa. If you don't like it spicier, use less. If you don't like lime, don't add the lime. If you don't like cilantro, don't add cilantro. So it's just like easy ways to like, kind of like a little roadmap of like everything I use. But if you don't like one thing, just leave it out and it'll still work. that's the other thing i love about the book is there's just like so much freedom in it yeah and especially if you're not familiar with the cuisine like being issued that permission at the beginning of the book is so exciting you can just dive in and be like yeah no thank you jalapeno and that's exactly if you don't like it spicy just leave some of it out or leave it all out or there's like these moments of genius i can just imagine in your brain where you're like would you like a cheeseburger in your flauta sure yeah here's a recipe right what's the chorizo poutine yeah what a good idea it's delicious oh my god i want to eat it so delicious and different but it's like the mexican flavors i grew up with with like dishes that i discovered later on as an adult that i didn't grow up having yeah and there's a lot of those in here it feels like a mexican comfort food mashup kind of situation it's like not necessarily tex-mex because when i tell people like Mexican-American cooking, everyone says, oh, so Tex-Mex like enchiladas and stuff like that.

11:26But it's like my own fusion of like Mexican flavors with American foods combined together. Who doesn't want to eat that? Yeah. Okay. So tell us like three or five like key flavors or ingredients. Key flavors or ingredients. In like Mexican cooking from your perspective. From my perspective. What are the things you love to cook with? 1 ,000 % lime, fresh lime juice. fresh squeeze of lime on anything changes it. I think we use a lot of cream cheese. A lot of people, you can add it to your sauces, obviously make it into this dip. And another one, I think just any good salsa. We always have that in the fridge.

12:06And I explained it in the book. If you add a little splash of white vinegar to it, it'll expand the lifespan of it. You can keep it in your fridge for up to three to four weeks sometimes and yeah it goes from days to fresh homemade salsa for whenever you need it oh my gosh for whenever you want to impress people yeah make new friends yeah totally there's also i loved seeing your use of chamoy in the book yeah and i'm gonna tell you i had to go to the google and be like what is chamoy so tell us about this luscious yeah it's like a it's hard to explain sometimes because it's like not a spicy sauce it's like a but it's slightly spicy but it's more sweet than spicy it's like sweet spicy tangy sour and most of the times in like mexican cooking well like traditionally it's usually just squirted over fresh fruit and that's how you eat it and more recently you use it to rim your drinks with like the chamoy and then some tajin on there and then you add the drink in there and funny enough it was like the first first the one recipe in here the chamoy mango chamoy wings is the very first recipe i developed for the book like as soon as i signed the contract the next day that's the recipe i made just because i love buffalo wings and one of the big flavors that everyone loves is the mango habanero one so it's like sweet and spicy so i kind of wanted to take that inspiration but using a mexican flavor with the chamoy and it was perfect yeah you get that same consistency of like the traditional american one with like the mexican flavors of like the sweet sticky spicy sauce that's awesome when you get an idea like that and then you execute it and you taste it yeah and it's perfect like what does that feel like it's just like crazy because like that's what cooking is you're just like adding a bunch of random things together and hoping it works and when it works it works sometimes it doesn't work you just have to go back to the drawing board but i love it that's i that's why i love cooking because you're just like always experimenting everything is like open everything's an option yeah that's awesome there's also these lovely little love letters in your book which i delighted in and there's one to elotes yeah tell us why it's worthy of a love letter i i think because growing up in chicago um there's eloteros where it's like an elote man just like walking around in a cart usually has a bike attached to it and he's just like riding around with it like honking a horn and we would have him all the time and like all of them made him slightly different and over the years we discovered the best one and like he still rides by our house and every time i'm back home i'm like begging for him to like stop by so i can have another one but it's just like the combination of like the sweet corn like the mayo, the cheese, the cotija cheese, like the lime, the spiciness to it.

15:04I just love it. Like I loved it before it was a thing. And like everyone does elote everything. And there's a lot of elote inspired recipes in the book. And that's why it deserved its own little love letter. Oh, it was beautiful. And there's different ways to do it, right? You can have it in a cup or you have it on the cob. In a cup, on the cob. I like both. the cob on the cob it's like a little more traditional but it's also much much messier yeah um but i i love it all the time like i usually sometimes i'll do it like for dinner like that's like a big cup of it or a bowl i'll make it at home and that's my dinner with your hot cheetos sometimes if i if i'm feeling guilty and i need that extra pleasure in there yeah that is awesome yeah it sounded delicious and there's an elote focaccia recipe Yes.

15:54It's just like. That's probably like one of like the more technical recipes in the book and like slightly more advanced. But it's super easy if you like follow the instructions. But yeah, I was like at this point, there should have been there could be a whole book on Elote recipes. Yeah. I still have so many that I didn't do that. I'm like, if there's a second book, like there's going to be a dedicated chapter just to Elote recipes. That is a great idea. So, yeah. Oh, sign me up. Totally. So it's a beautiful book. I'm sure your family is proud of it. You've got all these lovely family photos at the beginning, which by the way, my daughter looked at like they are her family.

16:29She was very excited about it. Many people have said that. One of my friends, he sent me a picture of his three-year-old son, just like laying on the floor, like looking at the book and the pictures and everything. Totally into it. It's so visually engaging. Thank you. Did your mom or your grandma or any of the aunts who grew up eating their delicious food flip through this book and go, where's my recipe for, like what what were they what they give you a little bit of grief not really they just like they they're all they've all been super happy for it yeah none of them have really fought over the recipes at least not that i'm not that i know they're keeping it away from you yeah probably you probably have a separate group chat that's awesome and there's just so many delightful like twists and turns of stories about the women who were important to you growing up and the food that you ate so those are those are really lovely to read thank you yeah do all any of you googlers who are here with us today have questions you want to ask chef alfredo so i'm not sure how it was in your household but at least in mine there's a lot of products that my family would use that are like prepackaged just like i throw this seasoning into anything to make it taste good now that you're a chef and like for example goya sazon or like uh the chicken bouillon how much of that stuff do you use in your in your cooking now that you're like an actual chef um i it really just depends on the recipe uh because i like cook more and like i experiment a little more now i don't use the chicken bouillon as much as i did a couple years ago just because i try to mostly just use salt for newer recipes.

18:09And then after trying that recipe with just salt, then maybe a second or third time, I'll do it with chicken bouillon and see what the difference is. So I try to keep it simple first. And then when I keep on experiment, I'll like do the different things that my mom would use growing up. Actually, that question reminds me of one of my favorite parts of the book where you share your mole recipe and how much you used to hate mole. Yeah, because everyone uses the jarred stuff from the store and it's super bitter and I don't like it. I thought I didn't like it. And when I still have mole, I have to ask, like, did you make it with this?

18:47And if they say yes, I don't order it. Because no matter how much you add to it, it still has that taste from the jarred thing that I don't like. Jar taste? Yeah. So, like, it looks like a hard recipe because there's so many ingredients. But if you separate everything out and then you start cooking, it's, like, super easy to make it. That's awesome. I learned from Chef Jenny that that's mise en place. Yes. Yeah. I don't like to say the word because I feel like I say it wrong or different every time and I don't want to get in trouble for it. But I was looking to you to make sure I said it right.

19:17You did say it right. You did say it right. Yeah. We did it. But so what inspired you to try making a mole if you disliked it so much? When I first made it, or I think when I first had mole that I actually liked that was fully homemade from scratch, not using any store-bought products. And obviously because of TikTok and like everyone kept on asking me for a mole recipe. And I never made it because I had never, I didn't know how to make it. My mom always made it with the jarred stuff that I didn't like. Whenever she made it, I wouldn't eat it. So I did a bunch of research and I saw that like everyone makes mole different.

19:56there's like 30 40 different ingredients in everyone's mole like someone will use this but they won't use that someone will use that and they won't use another thing so it's like you can pretty much just customize it to whatever you prefer nice so that's what you did yeah and then you shared it with us yeah thank you and it's also in a matrix so there's like other ways I love mole chilaquiles. Oh, man. I want now. I want that. It's like sweet, spicy with like the... Because mole is like a chocolate based sauce, which is crazy, but it's delicious. And like with like pickled red onions and like a runny yolk on top.

20:36It's delicious. You put your own pizza in here, didn't you? Yeah, use it as a sauce. So genius. It doesn't have to just be with a chicken. Yeah. Loved it. Other questions? When developing new recipes, like a cookbook, do you have a specific thing that you're aiming for or inspiration? I think most of my inspiration comes from like traveling and trying new foods. So usually if I go to a restaurant and I like something, I'm like, I can make that but kind of different or like make it slightly easier. so I just try to make things that because I live alone so I know whatever I make someone else is going to eat it because I can't eat it all myself so I make it with like that in mind of like who I'm going to text to come over and eat or take the food so it's just like developing recipes around things that I've had that I've never made before and hoping it works out.

21:30What are some of your favorite dishes to make and are the recipes in the book favorite dishes to make i love breakfast so like there's a whole chapter for breakfast in there um i will have breakfast for dinner almost four times a week just because it's easy and like the egg gives you that protein that you need and it's like a very quick thing to make so it's a lot of breakfast or like quick like Like maybe not like a full dinner, but it's kind of like an appetizer. But like I'll have that as a dinner. So, yeah, it's like a lot of easier things. So after cooking, like I just like don't want to spend more time in the kitchen.

22:11How much does Chicago and Chicago-ness and Chicago's Mexican community and the food that's eaten there inform the book? um there's a lot not maybe not a lot of chicago inspiration but like al pastor is one of my favorite meats for tacos um one of my favorite restaurants for tacos al pastor is in chicago like right in my backyard so i kind of tried to like make mine as close to theirs as possible obviously chicago you have like italian beefs and hot giardiniera so like that's like a spicy the pickled, the vinegary sauce condiment type thing. The elotes over there, a lot of the elotes, they have like the fake parquet butter on there.

22:56It does get a call out. Yeah, yeah. So it's like those little things that like keep me going back to Chicago and like remind me of Chicago when I'm not in Chicago. Oh, nice. So if you're like homesick for Chicago, you're like, it's parquet butter day. Yeah, or Giardinero on something. Awesome. Any other questions? Chef. What do you think is the biggest misconception about Mexican cuisine that you encounter? I think in the States is that a lot of people say that if you're going to a Mexican restaurant, they assume it's Tex-Mex. And it's not necessarily true. That's more of a Texas thing. But a lot of people usually say, like, if you're eating Mexican food here, like, oh, you're having Tex-Mex.

23:41But there's a lot of traditional like good Mexican restaurants in the States that it's completely different. And like with my cooking, a lot of like because it's a lot of like that mix and mashup of like Mexican-American flavors where when I explain it to people, a lot of the times they say, oh, so it's Tex-Mex. But it's not really. It's like the burger. The book has a chilaquiles burger, which is like a burger is like the most American thing you can get. But if you top it with chilaquiles, it's like Mexican-American. The cheeseburger flautas that you mentioned, there's a Mexican chicken parmesan, which is like chicken parmesan, like kind of like a more Italian-American thing.

24:22But then making the sauce with the Mexican flavors. So it's just like a lot of people associate Mexican cooking in the States with Tex-Mex and it's not true. Yeah, you also have baked spaghetti in here. Yes. It's like a lot of people call it like Mexican spaghetti because it's the way our Mexican's mom made it growing up. But then I top it with like the cheese and the chorizo on top to give it that like choriqueso vibe, like the melty cheese. So it's adding all of those like Mexican things that I love to like American things. That changes how I'm going to approach my fridge. Yeah. I'm like, oh, I can put them together.

25:01Now I need this and this and I can put that together. Yeah. What will it do? Yeah. Chef Alfredo said it's okay. Totally. Awesome. Any other questions we missed? Oh, yeah. One more. What's the most difficult dish you've tried making? Difficult dish I've tried making. I think it's whenever I'm making bread. Because, like, I love, like, I've tried making sourdough for a while. I can never get it right. So, like, when I made focaccia for the first time, it was from someone else's cookbook. I was like, this is super easy. but people think it's complicated because of the bread and the yeast and letting it rise and rest and all of that stuff so like i think that was one of the harder ones to make um just because it is you do have to be a little more precise and you can't just like add a little bit of this and a little bit of that you actually need to like measure it out but i think that would be like some of the more difficult ones what will you tell somebody who's excited to cook something whether it's a recipe from your book or when they find somewhere else.

26:03But it just like looks complicated. Like I can't cook. Do I have this in me? Like how do you get ready to approach it? I think for most people like following a recipe does seem like like a chore and like it's hard to do. But that's kind of what I've been saying about like cookbooks and how I approach cookbooks. It's if I see a recipe for something that I've maybe made in the past, but then I see this person has that same recipe, it's slightly different or different ingredients, different flavors. Just kind of like if you've made it before, but that person uses one different ingredient, just do it the way you make it, but then add that ingredient that they do.

26:44So it's like use it as a roadmap. So it's like if you don't have all the ingredients and you have everything but one, but it's like a minor thing, make it without it. and it'll still be fine next time make it with it. So it's like, look at all the ingredients and just like, I don't want to say figure it out, but it's like, you can easily adjust to what you have in your kitchen without having to like, oh, I have everything, but one thing I need to go to the store to buy it. Just like work around it. Usually there's a substitute or you can leave it out and it'll still work out fine. That's awesome.

27:18So like, here's some good ideas, but you don't have to use them all. Yeah. Go ahead. See what happens. Exactly. It's just a roadmap. I love it. Anybody else? So I feel like traditionally Mexican food can get very spicy. Obviously, you're making a cookbook for a lot of different people. How do you take that into consideration? There's actually a little note in the introduction where it's like, I like spicy food. I grew up with spicy food. But if you don't like spicy food, there's different ways you can make it less spicy. Like if I'm using jalapeños, I never take the seeds out. but if you don't like it to be too spicy you can cut it in half and take out the seeds or if the recipe calls for two only use one so there's like little easy things you can do to like adjust the recipe to like your spice level and that also goes for spices that aren't heat right like anything yeah like if you don't love garlic don't use the garlic powder you don't like onion don't use onion powder if you cannot eat enough mexican oregano just put it in everything leave it out yeah or add more i put in everything if you don't like cilantro as much as i do just use very little of it so it's just use more of what you like and less of what you don't like awesome everything becomes your own signature dish exactly i love it thank you all for coming today thank you for watching along for our talks at google with chef alfredo garcia and enjoy the book

28:51Thanks for listening. You can watch this episode and tons of other great content at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Talk soon.