♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - This week on Milk Street, I visit with Paola Briseño-González, who teaches us about the cooking of her hometown, Puerto Vallarta.

We begin with a quick beef stew, carne en su jugo, an amazing banana custard pie from Yelapa, and then a Colima-style shredded braised pork.

Please stay tuned as we explore the cooking of Jalisco in Mexico.

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♪ ♪ - Paola Briseño-González grew up in Puerto Vallarta with an amazing cuisine that is little known even in Los Angeles where I recently stopped by to visit both her and Javier Cabral, an expert on the local taco scene.

It's so interesting when you get recipes from people, there's a range of potential outcomes.

The food was just, it was different, right?

- Yeah.

- Something... not like something I had before.

And it was really good.

- Yeah.

Yeah, I often tell Javier that I feel like in the U.S., that, you know, food that we eat at home in Mexico because people know street food in Mexico or like, high end, I feel like this middle class... - Right.

- Like, the food at home is the food that we don't see often here.

You know, I love a great black mole.

Like mole negro is amazing, but you don't eat that every day.

It's a lot to digest, you know?

It's really a celebration dish and, you know, I think people think that we eat mole every day and, you know, we really like the guisados, and like, you know, stews and braised, you know, meats and, you know, for me, I'm from the coast, there's a lot of seafood guisados.

So, you know, that's the food that I am really passionate about, that, you know, I think it's approachable but also very interesting.

- Well, maybe we should go cook some of the food you're passionate about, and I would like to eat!

(chuckles) ♪ ♪ This is a dish you grew up with.

It's your father's favorite recipe, and it's one of those things that takes under an hour.

But it's got beef, it's got beans, and it's just got great depth, which is hard to do quickly, right?

- It relies on beef broth and sometimes you know, you can add some diced bacon, crispy bacon as a garnish, or just keep it simple with some cilantro and lime, and I think it just really transports you into a combo of pho and carne asada tacos when you're eating it.

It's just so satisfying.

- So this is thinly sliced beef, quickly cooked, and then what do you do?

- You know, you cook them lightly, and you really want to release all of the juices, So, you know, Chris, I know you tell everyone not to crowd the pan and I hear for this recipe, you do need to crowd the pan to release all of that flavor, and, really, that you're gonna build on that base of those juices that were released, and add the beef broth.

And then the key ingredient here is tomatillo.

Your broth will kind of look like half and half of beef broth and also salsa verde.

So you know, you have that nice tartness from the tomatillos and the slight bitterness that just goes really well with the flavors.

- And this cooks in like 30, 40 minutes, right?

- Yeah, it's so, it's so fast.

I mean that's, that was lunch at home all the time, you know?

With some, like, melted cheese on the side, you make your own quesadillas and, you know, it's a great meal.

- Beef in its own juices.

♪ ♪ So one of the recipes Paola taught me when I was out of Los Angeles is carne en su jugo, which is "meat in its juices."

And there's a couple things about this recipe I really love.

Cooks pretty quickly, in under an hour, and that's because the meat's cut into really small pieces.

So we decided to use short rib versus other cuts.

We like the flavor, it's very rich.

It has a good amount of fat in it, which is nice.

So we have the meat cut in nice, small pieces.

This is Worcestershire sauce, and soy sauce, and half a teaspoon of pepper.

The salt and the soy sauce and the Worcestershire sauce is gonna act a little bit like a brine.

Adds some flavor and also help it retain its juices.

♪ ♪ We started with some tomatillos, we've cooked briefly or poached; they add a really great flavor.

They're used a lot in Mexican cooking, and other places, and they're going to be the basis, really, for the sauce in which we cook the short ribs.

So we'll put them in the blender.

The two other ingredients is a low sodium beef broth, goes in, just a cup of that, and a little bit of coarsely chopped onion.

Obviously, you don't have to chop it finely because the blender will do the work.

Okay.

So, we're gonna hold on that, because we have one other ingredient and we'll start cooking the meat.

So we'll start with just a tablespoon oil.

The next thing we do is cook the garlic for just a minute.

So put that in.

Okay, I'm gonna put the meat in right away because I don't want that garlic to burn.

(sizzling) So I'm gonna let the meat just set for a minute or two.

So then we'll release from the bottom of the pan, and we'll cook this for, you know, five, six minutes.

Just get it nicely browned.

So now I'm doing something really odd.

I'm taking two tablespoons of this meat and putting it into the blender.

It thickens up the sauce nicely, add some flavor.

But one of the things is, it's really hard to measure this using a tablespoon, so we'll just do it this way.

Put that in the top.

And we're gonna hold the top down pretty hard, because this is really full.

Let it go for about a minute.

(blender whirring) (whirring stops) Okay.

So now we're gonna add this tomatillo puree with the stock and onions and a little bit of meat to the pot, along with our other ingredients.

So three cups of low sodium beef broth go in.

A couple bay leaves, and a chili as well, stir.

So we'll bring this up to a slow simmer.

And we're gonna cook this for 40, 45 minutes.

♪ ♪ So it's been about 45 minutes.

Instead of soaking beans overnight in salted water, we're using two cans of pinto beans.

We'll let that simmer for about 15 minutes, and we'll finish up.

So this has been 15 minutes.

Now, how easy was this?

Right, short ribs, cooks in under an hour.

You have the nice, bright flavor of the tomatillos, which is great, and you can garnish it with lots of things-- obviously lime, onion, cilantro.

And my favorite thing is salsa macha.

It's a chili sauce, but also has nuts in it.

And you essentially fry or sauté the nuts and add them, which gives it this really sort of thick texture.

It's just an incredibly deep rich, complex salsa.

It's my favorite salsa.

So that's carne en su jugo, meat cooked in its own juices.

Thanks to Paola González from Puerto Vallarta in Jalisco in Mexico.

A really easy stew, takes less than an hour, with big fresh flavors.

♪ ♪ One of the dishes you taught me is a banana pie, but it's nothing like what I think of as banana pie, it's just happens to be easier and better.

- Well, this one is portable banana pie, like a handheld banana pie, you know, that you find in a beach down near Puerto Vallarta called Yelapa, and, you know, you buy it from the beach vendors that happen to sell pie.

So this one has, like, so much banana flavor in the custard, and also there's a layer of fresh banana on the bottom, and you know there's a nice brulee at the top, and just so creamy and, you know, I just love the crust that is, like, really rustic and shortbread-y.

You know, this is not a a flaky, delicate pie, this is the pie that you, like, stab with a fork and, you know, scrape your plate with.

So it's delicious.

- So you pre-bake a crust, cover it with sliced bananas, with a blender custard, with more banana, and sweetened condensed milk, - Yeah.

- Which is the dessert sweetener of choice.

But it also has concentrated banana flavor.

It's not all fluffy with whipped cream.

- Yeah.

- It's delicate, but it's great banana flavor.

♪ ♪ We've done banana pie, years ago, I think we actually made a banana pie, that fluffy thing.

But I was in L.A. not too long ago with Paola Briseño-González, who is from Puerto Vallarta, had just these amazing recipes, things that I'd never seen before, and one of them was banana pie.

So I'm going, like, we'll get the whipped cream and the heavy cream.

- Yeah.

- No, it was a totally different thing; in fact, I think, you know, really much better.

- Mm-hm.

- Because it's really about the bananas, it's not about fluff.

- And not only that, it's extremely easy to make.

For some people, the hardest part about a pie is the crust.

And you're going to see we're about to make probably one of the easiest pie crusts.

- Without a food processor.

- No food-- no, very little equipment.

We have a quarter-cup of water and if you could go ahead and put that in the pan for me, Chris, that would be great.

- (chuckles) Okay.

- And then we're gonna add four tablespoons of salted butter, and a quarter-cup of vegetable shortening.

- Okay.

- And then we're gonna heat this all together on medium-high heat.

And the idea is we want to just bring it to a simmer, while melting the two fats together at the same time.

While you're monitoring that, here we have a cup-and-a-half of all purpose flour, and I'm just going to add to that quarter of a teaspoon of table salt, just gonna give that a little whisk to incorporate it.

And then I'm just gonna make a little well in the center.

So we can go ahead and add that to our flour mixture.

Right in the well, perfect.

Now you want to work quickly here, you want to go ahead and stir that all together.

And because that liquid was hot, the flour's gonna clump up pretty quickly, and you just want to make sure there's no dry bits of flour.

All right, so I'm just gonna scooch this off to the side, and I'm gonna lay out a piece of plastic wrap.

You want one that's at least 12 inches by 12 inches.

And then I'm gonna transfer this right in the center.

It's a little bit warm, so you want to be careful, but I'm just gonna pat it out into sort of a circular shape.

Just make rolling out a little bit easier.

All right, and then I'm gonna put another piece on top.

We are going to roll it out to a 12-inch circle.

You don't want to roll it much thinner than like a quarter-inch.

And it's great when it's on the plastic because you can move it around, peel off the top layer here.

And then I like to just grab it by two of the corners, and then I just sort of flip it over.

Again, if it's not perfect, it's okay, because we can... - You always say that, and then it is perfect.

- (chuckles) This is not quite perfect!

I got some hanging over the edge, but you can just trim some from this side, and add it over onto this side.

And then I just wanna make sure there's no air bubbles underneath.

And then I'm just creating a little bit of an edge here.

And then once that's done, give it a little bit of a flute, fluted edge here.

It's a little sticky, so I try to work quickly and not really have my fingers on the dough too long.

So now I'm just gonna line this with a large piece of aluminum foil.

Again, I'm trying to be really gentle, to not smoosh down those edges.

And then I'm going to line it with pie weights.

This is about two cups of pie weights.

And now we are ready to go into an oven that I preheated to 375 degrees with the rack set in the middle position.

It's gonna bake for 20 minutes, just until it's set.

Then we're gonna remove the foil and the weights.

And then if it's bubbled up at all, we're just gonna prick out those little bubbles with a fork, and then put it back in the oven for another 12 to 15 minutes till it's like a nice, light golden brown.

♪ ♪ Okay, Chris so here we have our beautiful pie crust, so we can go ahead and start making our delicious banana custard filling.

So we're gonna start with about a pound of bananas.

It's about three medium bananas.

Just gonna go ahead and peel them.

And if you wouldn't mind, we're gonna place a few of these in the bottom of the pie crust.

- Now we're going into a second layer here?

- We are not, and actually, that's what's really cool about this recipe.

A lot of banana custard pie recipes will just have the bananas added sliced like this.

- Mm-hm.

- But we actually decided to take it up to another level, and we're gonna go ahead and put the rest of these bananas straight into this blender, and add them to the filling.

- Oh.

- Okay.

This is one 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk.

- You know, I've grown to love that as an ingredient in baking.

- I was just gonna say!

It's one of the... - Yeah.

- I think I always associated it as being sort of an old-fashioned ingredient, but it is wonderful.

We're gonna add a quarter-cup of regular whole milk.

This is two large eggs plus a yoke.

Teaspoon of vanilla extract.

Quarter-teaspoon of table salt.

Whip it up in the blender, we're gonna let it go for about 15 to 30 seconds, just till it's all smooth.

(blender whirring) (blender stops) It's done.

And I'm gonna go ahead and pour this over the bananas-- it's okay if some of the bananas float up to the surface, and you want to make sure you don't overfill, sometimes you might have a little bit of filling left over.

I think I'm gonna stop right there.

Okay.

- So when I do this, it's always this tense moment, like, how far can I fill it?

- I know, you want to keep pushing it further.

But I really don't want it to spill over in the oven, and when it does bake, it is gonna poof up a little bit.

So it's ready to go, we're gonna put it into a 325 degree oven and it's gonna bake for about an hour.

And you're gonna know it's done when it's all poofed up, and light golden brown on the edges, and it's just gonna barely jiggle in the center.

- Okay.

♪ ♪ - Wow, okay.

- Yeah, are you excited-- you're getting excited!

(laughs) - You know, I'm just thinking, like, how big a piece can I have, and it doesn't look ludicrous?

- I'm just gonna, here, I'm gonna give you the whole pie.

(laughs) - No, I don't want the whole pie.

But I want, I want a big one, okay.

- So this has been cooling now, completely, to room temperature, about two hours.

And now we're gonna do the best, what I think is the best part.

We're gonna add sort of, like, a thin, caramelized sugar layer, like a creme brulee.

So this is three tablespoons of granulated sugar.

I'm just gonna sprinkle this on top, you want to make sure you do it right before you serve it.

You want to make sure that the sugar is in a fairly even layer.

So that it'll melt evenly.

Going to sprinkle this last bit.

All right.

- So do you have any tips for people who haven't done this before, who are a little concerned about setting themselves on fire?

(laughter) - Well, always point it away from yourself, that's the number one tip.

No, I think that I'm... and you can see, I'm working at a pretty low heat level and I find it gives me a little bit more control.

I mean, even though it's taking a little bit longer, you just want to concentrate on melting the sugar first before it starts caramelizing.

- And why is that?

- Parts of it will totally caramelize, and there'll be parts underneath that are still raw.

I'm gonna call that done.

So that's it, - Mmm.

- And we're ready to slice in.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- All right, that could be my piece.

- Okay.

- It is a very flaky crust.

There you go.

- Mm!

And I believe we also have some whipped cream over there, that's beautiful.

- Ooh.

- Yeah, that looks great.

- This is gonna be so good.

- It smells great.

Mm.

- Mm.

- There's so much banana flavor in this pie.

- Every year at Milk Street, I have a moment.

(chuckling) Maybe, maybe more than one, but this is my moment here, right now.

- And somehow it's not too sweet, it's just intensely flavored.

And the crust is, you know, it's flaky.

- Well, you're right, you would need a fairly structured crust here.

- Mm-hm.

- Because you would get soggy, - Right.

- And it wouldn't hold up very well.

So thanks to Paola in L.A.

This is a grown-up banana cream pie from Yelapa, which is south of Puerta Vallarta on the Mexican coast.

We don't have the water.

We're not at the beach, but we do have the pie, and this is absolutely terrific.

- So you're gonna do a shredded pork, but it's nothing like my shredded pork.

Well this is the tatemado de Colima, and you know the, really, the star ingredient here is vinegar.

And Colima, being the biggest producer of coconuts in Mexico, you find all kinds of really great products made with coconut, and one of them is coconut vinegar, and this is actually added to the pork.

There's really, like, really beautiful brightness that comes through, and then I add some coconut milk just to round it all up, and think it adds just really nutty richness to the dish.

- So this is, like, a pork shoulder it goes in the oven for four hours, - Mm-hm.

- And then you can finish it with a quick broil just to crisp up the bits up top, if you like, right?

- Yeah, and a pile of really nice hot tortillas, maybe some rice, you have a great dinner.

- And very little work.

- Yeah.

You know, for me it's really like the flavors of home, you know with the coconut, and the high acid.

I feel like it really encapsulates what the type of cooking that you see on the coast of Mexico, which I feel like the biggest ambassador for the coastal cuisine of Mexico, and I think that's a good example of that.

- Mm.

- You know?

- Thank you, Paola, this is outstanding.

- So glad you enjoyed, Chris.

- Yeah.

♪ ♪ - So today we are going to be making a tatemado de Colima, which is a shredded and braised pork with tons of flavor.

I've got Guajillo chilies here.

And I have stemmed and seeded them, but to use them, I'm going to need to soak them.

And once they soak up nicely, I'm going to use them in my marinade.

I'm going to pull them off the heat and cool them so I can actually handle them.

In the meantime, let's get our pork ready.

So we've got our guajillo chilies done.

I'm going to take this big piece of pork, and score it, so we can make sure that the flavors get through.

I've got about a six or seven pound pork butt here, bone in.

We want all of that flavor.

And I'm going to start off by doing some little cross hatches on the fat side.

About an inch apart.

But you want just enough of the fat.

We got a little bit broken up texture over here.

And then we're ready to start our marinade.

♪ ♪ So I've got my scored pork butt in my pot.

I'm using an enameled Dutch oven, and it's pretty important because we have a lot of vinegar.

We have a lot of acid, and as that cooks, it can result in this super tinny, off kind of flavor for this pork, and you don't want that.

So now that my chilies have cooled down enough to handle, I'm going to put them into my blender, to get them blended up for our marinade.

We are going to add some seasonings.

We've got some sugar, some cumin, some coriander, bay leaves, a good bit of salt, and some freshly cracked pepper.

I have some garlic cloves, some minced ginger, little bit of tomato paste, and then we've got the coconut factor.

So we've got some coconut milk here.

I'm going to pour this in.

And if you can't find coconut vinegar for this recipe, don't worry, I couldn't either.

I'm using some unseasoned rice vinegar in its place.

All right, I think we've got everything in there.

Ready to buzz it.

(blender whirring) (blender stops) And we are going to pour this over our pork.

♪ ♪ All right, got every last bit of that goodness in there.

My oven's been preheating at 325 degrees, and I'm gonna let this guy cook for about five hours or so, until it's fork tender and ready to go.

♪ ♪ All right, this guy's been cooking for about five hours now.

I'm going to heat up my broiler just so we can get a little color on the top, and should be done in just a few minutes.

So after a few minutes in the broiler, we've got some excellent color on top of our pork.

I went ahead and took it out of the Dutch oven so I can work on my braising liquid.

So I'm gonna use my spoon here and just pull some of the fat off of the top layer.

Now I don't want to pull all of this off because fat is flavor.

So I will leave it just a bit and get this heated up, so that when my shredded pork is ready, it goes straight into warm braising liquid.

All right.

And while this heats back up, I am going to shred my pork.

And all I'm gonna do is just pull it apart, and pull it off the bone.

Whoo, look at that, that looks good.

So I'm adding this back to my, about 2.5 cups of braising liquid.

If you have more than four cups, you want to make sure it reduces down.

But as I add this, I pulled out the bone, some of the extra fat.

But I still want all of the flavor.

There we go.

Give it a stir.

So I'm going to let this cook in the braising liquid for about five to eight minutes.

And when we come back, it'll be ready to eat.

That looks really good, smells good, it looks good.

So I'm going to serve up some of my rice and beans.

Get my pork out of the pot, right onto my plate.

Add a little bit of chopped up onions.

And some lime juice for just a bit of tang.

Now we're ready to go.

To make this recipe and all the recipes that you've seen today, head over to MilkStreetTV.com, and you'll be as happy as I am.

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- Funding for this series was provided by the following: - That meal.

You sautéed, you seared, and you served, cooking with All-Clad, bonded cookware designed, engineered, and assembled in the U.S.A. for over 50 years.

All-Clad-- for all your kitchen adventures.

♪ ♪ (man speaking Hebrew) - (speaking world language) - Bonjour, je m'appelle Chris.

- We call it supa kanja.

It's the word for gumbo.

♪ ♪ - Christopher, you have to make the authentic, original cotoletta alla Bolognese for me.

♪ ♪ - So this is the Eduardo García blender.

- This is the no electricity.

♪ ♪ - Next is dessert.

- That is really good.

♪ ♪ I notice when you cook sometimes, you add a little bit of something, and then you just put the whole bowl in.

- I like to be generous with my food.

Generosity is important in cooking.

- That's true.

♪ ♪ - Can start building bridges, and food is definitely a perfect common ground.

♪ ♪ - This is a generational thing.

It's, it's something that you inherit.

♪ ♪ - Yeah, that was great.

(woman speaking Mandarin) - What was this for?

What did she say?

- You get one more chance.

- Salute.

- How is it?

He's speechless.

- I'm speechless.

That's so good.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪