We Are La Cocina: Recipes in Pursuit of the American Dream

This book is dedicated to all of those who have passed through our kitchen and to all of those who will. You are all the inspiration any of us need.

Text copyright © 2019 by La Cocina.

Foreword copyright © 2019 Isabel Allende.

Photographs copyright © 2019 by Eric Wolfinger, Sarah Peet (pages 206–7), and Leticia Landa (page 277).

Illustrations copyright © 2019 by Jackie Ho (pages 20–21), Sophie Morro (page 67), Samantha Novak (page 87), and Monica Martinez (page 121).

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-4521-7200-2 (epub, mobi)

ISBN 978-1-4521-6786-2 (hardcover)

All inspiration from and credit to the entrepreneurs of La Cocina past and present, who are the heart and soul of this book.

Design & typesetting by Alice Chau.

Food & prop styling by Alma Espinola.

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10

FOREWORD

12

INTRODUCTION

20

LA COCINA AT A GLANCE

22

LA COCINA: THE KITCHEN

24

MENU IDEAS

27

VERONICA SALAZAR

El Huarache Loco

Caldo de Gallina 30

Ensalada Doña Luz 33

35

MARIA DEL CARMEN FLORES

Estrellita’s Snacks

Pupusas 36

Curtido 36

41

GUISELL HARITH OSORIO

Sabores del Sur

Empanadas de Pollo 43

Alfajores 46

49

DIONNE KNOX

Zella’s Soulful Kitchen

Cream Biscuits 51

Breakfast Sausage 52

Strawberry-Hibiscus Jam 55

57

KELLY ZUBAL

Inticing Creations

Espresso Chocolate Ganache Cake 59

Baked Butter Mochi 63

65

ISABEL CAUDILLO

El Buen Comer

Mole Verde con Puerco 69

Albóndigas 70

Sopa de Fideo 73

75

MARIA CASTILLO

Botanas Felicitas

Pepitas Callejeras 76

79

DILSA LUGO

Los Cilantros

Sopes 81

Esquites 85

87

KOJI KANEMATSU

Onigilly

Onigiri 88

Miso Nasu 88

Spicy Shrimp 88

Sha-ke 90

93

ELVIA BUENDIA

La Luna Cupcakes

Pastelitos Tres Leches 94

97

ALICIA VILLANUEVA

Alicia’s Tamales Los Mayas

Tamal de Frijol 100

107

LA COCINA’S KIOSK

Peas of Mind:

Forbidden Rice Krispy Squares 110

NeoCocoa:

Rose Petal Bark 110

Kika’s Treats:

Pão de Mel 111

Clairesquares:

Apple Crumble 111

Love & Hummus:

Crispy Chickpeas 112

Sal de Vida:

Quesadilla de Flor de Jamaica 113

Sajen: Jamu 113

115

GABRIELA GUERRERO

Delicioso Crêperie

Crepa de Cordero en Adobo 117

121

MONICA MARTINEZ

Don Bugito

123

FERNAY MCPHERSON

Minnie Bell’s Soul Movement

Mac and Cheese 129

Rosemary Fried Chicken 131

135

GUADALUPE (LUPE) GUERRERO

El Pipila

Comida de Pobreza 137

Nopales Guisados 138

Pozole Verde 141

143

BINITA PRADHAN

Bini’s Kitchen

Momos 146

Golveda Ko Achar 148

Kwati 150

153

MARIKO GRADY

Aedan Fermented Foods

Miso 155

Miso Shiru 157

Jardinière’s Miso Compound Butter and Miso Vinaigrette 158

MISO COMPOUND BUTTER 158

MISO VINAIGRETTE 158

Bi-Rite Market’s Steamed Manila Clams with Miso 159

161

HEENA PATEL

Besharam

Haldar Puri 163

Batata Nu Shaak 165

167

CHARLES FARRIER

Crumble & Whisk

New York–Style Cheesecake 168

171

STEPHANIE FIELDS

Sugarfoot

Bourbon Buttermilk Grits Pie 173

Cheese Grits 175

177

SHANI JONES

Peaches Patties

Beef Patties 179

Jerk Chicken 182

185

NITE YUN

Nyum Bai

Bai Sach Chrouk 191

Kuy Teav Phnom Penh 192

Neorm Sach Moan 195

197

REEM ASSIL

Reem’s

Fattoush 199

Sfeeha 200

Muhammara 203

207

SAN FRANCISCO STREET FOOD FESTIVAL

Endless Summer Sweets 208

D’Maize 208

Hella Vegan Eats 209

211

TINA STEVENS

A Girl Named Pinky

True Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting 212

215

NAFY FLATLEY

Teranga

Teranga Bissap 217

Mafè 219

221

GUADALUPE MORENO

Mi Morena

Tinga de Pollo 224

227

LAMEES DAHBOUR

Mama Lamees

Maqluba 231

Samak Mashwe Bilforn 234

237

AISAN HOSS AND MEHDI PARNIA

Oyna Natural Foods

Kuku Sabzi 239

Kashke Bademjan 240

243

ROSIE ORTIZ

Mission Boricua

245

HANG TRUONG

Noodle Girl

Phở Bò 247

Cá Kho Tộ 250

253

ALMA RODRIGUEZ

Mixiote

Mixiote de Carne 255

259

AILEEN SUZARA

Sariwa

Binakol na Manok 261

Lumpiang Gulay 262

Ensaladang Talong 265

267

ROSA MARTINEZ

Origen

Chilito de Puerco 273

Frijol Molido con Cholitas de Masa 274

276

ABOUT THESE RECIPES

278

MASTER RECIPES

Masa Dough Two Ways 278

MASA DOUGH WITH OIL 278

MASA DOUGH WITH LARD 278

Tortillas 279

Chicken Stock 279

280

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

281

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

282

RECIPE INDEX BY COUNTRY

283

INDEX

La Cocina is a nonprofit business incubator dedicated to supporting* talented, working-class food entrepreneurs, primarily immigrant women and women of color, in building successful food businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Our vision is that everyone will be able to make a living doing what they love to do.

*We do this by providing access to an affordable commercial kitchen, business consulting through a network of industry volunteers and mentors, sales opportunities, and connections to capital.

VERONICA SALAZAR 27 MARIA DEL CARMEN FLORES 35 GUISELL HARITH OSORIO 41 DIONNE KNOX 49 KELLY ZUBAL 57 ISABEL CAUDILLO 65 MARIA CASTILLO 75 DILSA LUGO 79 KOJI KANEMATSU 87 ELVIA BUENDIA 93 ALICIA VILLANUEVA 97 GABRIELA GUERRERO 115 MONICA MARTINEZ 121 FERNAY MCPHERSON 123 GUADALUPE (LUPE) GUERRERO 135 BINITA PRADHAN 143 MARIKO GRADY 153 HEENA PATEL 161 CHARLES FARRIER 167 STEPHANIE FIELDS 171 SHANI JONES 177 NITE YUN 185 REEM ASSIL 197 TINA STEVENS 211 NAFY FLATLEY 215 GUADALUPE MORENO 221 LAMEES DAHBOUR 227 AISAN HOSS AND MEHDI PARNIA 237 ROSIE ORTIZ 243 HANG TRUONG 245 ALMA RODRIGUEZ 253 AILEEN SUZARA 259 ROSA MARTINEZ 267

FOREWORD

by Isabel Allende

Traditions and dreams . . . these are what being an immigrant is all about. I have lived in the United States for more than 30 years without losing my culture, language, sense of family, or Chilean customs. This has allowed me to adapt easily; I am richer because I am bicultural. People like me, who bring traditions and dreams from afar, contribute to the strength and resilience of this extraordinary place that is America. And traditions and dreams are exactly what La Cocina harvests, transforms, and offers to the community at large.

Food is a vital part of our lives. In most countries, and certainly in Latin America, the kitchen, or any place where food is prepared, is the soul of the home. My mother died recently—she was 97 years young—and left me a precious legacy: her recipes and her lifetime love of and curiosity about food. She taught me to use cookbooks as inspiration only; a true cook trusts her or his intuition, innovates, improvises, and can devise a meal with whatever is available in the moment. This is certainly true of most women who feed their families with scarce resources.

After my daughter Paula died, when I needed to pull myself out of darkness and despair, my mother came up with the idea of writing about the opposite of mourning: the joy of life. And that’s how my book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses came to be. It’s about food and love, gluttony and lust—the only deadly sins that are worth the trouble.

Maybe this explains why I love La Cocina and the We Are La Cocina cookbook, which contains the distilled wisdom and experience of this extraordinary enterprise. I have been connected to La Cocina since its incubation, when Caleb Zigas came to my foundation in 2004 to tell us about a crazy project the community had envisioned: an industrial kitchen to empower low-income women of color, especially immigrants and refugees, to cook and market their products so that they can become financially independent. Although Caleb looked like a kid—he still does—I saw immediately the potential in the idea because, as a Latina, I can relate to cooking at a heart level. Often the memory of our extended families at the table sharing a meal—a tradition that usually takes a couple of hours or more—is all we have when we come to this country.

The dream was not so crazy after all. Leticia Landa joined La Cocina in 2008, and the organization’s surprising growth continued. Today, it is the most important food organization in San Francisco, a city known for its excellent cuisine from all over the world. It has also enabled hundreds of women to start their own businesses. To see a group of women handling fresh ingredients, chopping, dressing, frying, baking, grilling, and gossiping happily in different languages is a feast for the senses. If you were to watch them, as I have, they might offer you a taste of their dishes—which hail from Latin America, Africa, South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe—and then you would discover the secret of their success: this is food prepared with love.

La Cocina is much more than an excellent business. It is a place of work and stories, a warm and fragrant hearth where women (and some men) prepare food from their countries of origin and share their lives. For most La Cocina entrepreneurs, a few recipes handed down from mothers and grandmothers were their only capital when they came to the United States. It seems almost magical that they can use those recipes as a means of self-expression, making a living, supporting their families, and preserving their culture. Through food, they too can aspire to the American dream.

Cooking brings people together. The kitchen is a safe place to tell our personal stories; no matter how tragic they might be, there’s always room for some laughter. We all need to be heard; we all want to know more about others. While cooking, women open their hearts and share their sorrows and joys; no one feels lonely in a communal kitchen. In many of my novels, food has an essential role because it helps me to define the characters and to give flavor and authenticity to the story. Eating brings people together as well, especially when food inspired by other cultures arouses our curiosity.

Today, as has often happened in the past, we live in hard times; division, distrust, and fear are rampant. But I have lived long enough to know that these hard times will pass and, eventually, the best of the human condition will prevail. In the meantime, maybe we can start to heal by listening to one another’s stories and sharing the food of diversity that La Cocina offers.

INTRODUCTION

by Caleb Zigas

We’ve had the unique opportunity at La Cocina to build the world that we most want to live in. It’s a world, a kitchen more specifically, that welcomes anyone and everyone. We have done so in the name of economic opportunity and with the belief that everyone deserves an opportunity to make a living doing something that they love to do.

The act of writing resembles cooking in its intimacy—from us to you. With this cookbook, we hope, in some small way, to invite you into that world with us. In these pages, we hope that you will sense the power that drives these businesses and the truly impressive volume of work that the entrepreneurs at La Cocina accomplish. We write so that you might find not just something new to cook but also some small part of yourself, some scent or story, that will resonate and remind you of what has brought you to where you are today. Then, may you share that meal with others.

La Cocina was born out of San Francisco’s Mission District in the 1990s, a vibrant neighborhood with an active informal economy; people, mostly women, selling food on the streets and out of their homes as a way to patch income—a dollar here, a dollar there—in an uncertain environment. The most basic belief of our organization is that in the often-forgotten corners of our cities—dense immigrant neighborhoods, low-income high-rise apartment buildings, the blacktops of taxi depots—talented food entrepreneurs thrive by making use of what’s available to them. Given access to affordable commercial kitchen space, high-level business advice, places to sell, and access to capital, those cooks and artisans are able to transition their side gigs into the formal economy (licenses, permits, and taxes . . . oh my!) and, in doing so, create real and lasting ownership opportunities for themselves and their families. This simple act of creation can inspire, and very often employ, the people around them.

In the years that we’ve been working in these communities, it remains abundantly clear the ways in which the world we live in is deeply inequitable. If opportunity were distributed evenly and everyone was given equal access to the marketplace, the food world would look a lot more like La Cocina. The food industry has never been more celebrated, and yet, this is a country where 75 percent of food businesses are owned by men and where women in kitchens make, on average, 73 cents to a man’s dollar, even before accounting for race. Because race, too, affects opportunity in our industry. According to the Aspen Institute, lack of access to capital and race-based discrepancies in wealth unduly disadvantage aspiring entrepreneurs of color as they pursue their culinary visions. As customers, we also bear responsibility; we’re willing to pay top-tier prices for handmade Italian pastas without flinching, but chafe at a bowl of hand-pulled Chinese noodles that costs more than $10.

This isn’t a book about restaurants, or even exclusively about food. Instead, it’s about the people that make your food, who open restaurants; not merely a glimpse behind the kitchen door of a talented chef but also a sustained and passionate argument for wider opportunity. These entrepreneurs, in the quiet work that they do in hidden kitchens across the country, represent the best of what our cities have to offer. San Francisco was built on the backs of Native Ohlone farmers, Mexican tamale vendors, Italian fishermen, and Chinese noodle vendors, and every American place has a similar story. Our collective obligation, in an inclusive world, is to value all of these contributions honestly and equally.

We are all citizens of places built by immigrants and the dispossessed, all of us carving small moments of ourselves into the shifting sidewalks, cul-de-sacs, and driveways of the neighborhoods in which we live. The entrepreneurs in this book popped up in homes and on street corners before pop-ups had brokers and websites. These are the entrepreneurs that sold carne asada and carnitas from taco trucks before we started calling them food trucks. In other words, these are the innovators that our cities so desperately rely upon. Our failure to elevate or to properly value these entrepreneurs threatens to strangle the very innovation and vibrancy that our country, and world, requires.

The recipes that you find in this book reflect the tastes and foods of the city where La Cocina was founded but they also speak to something larger, something that we hope you might reconnect with—finding inspiration in your own kitchen, in the kitchens that you pass on your way to work, in the neighborhoods you’ve been meaning to visit. We offer a book of short stories—lives intertwined every day in our kitchen and the place that those moments build. We offer not just another tamale, bowl of pho, or chocolate cake, but, instead, our world in all its moments, impossible to truly measure or ever repeat. Every community’s stories are buried in recipes like the ones in this book. The talents and tastes of your community are all around you. We hope this book will inspire you to work a little harder to find them and perhaps even to join them.

The stories in our book collide. We know that Veronica Salazar’s caldo de gallina and Reem Assil’s sfeeha make for odd page fellows, but such are the geographic intersections that give birth to tacos arabes and al pastor. These collisions are true to our kitchen and to the world we choose to live in. We hope that in