News from Tacolicious

Jalapenos are Unreliable and Other Lessons from Recipe Testing the T-Lish Cookbook

by Sara Deseran under Uncategorized with 1 Comment

Friday, May 31, 2013

Grilling up onions, tomatoes, and habaneros for a salsa.

Salsa is tested and certified publishable!

Our habanero salsa calls for a blender.

Writing a cookbook takes a village. Particularly, a village of recipe testers. In the case of the Tacolicious book—which Joe, Telmo, and I are working on now with Ten Speed Press (Fall 2014)—the first round of testers includes Mike and Caitlin, our crack chefs at our Chestnut Street and Valencia Street locations respectively. These two have managed to squeeze in recipe testing along with running very busy restaurant kitchens.

The second round of testers includes both my mother—the tireless home cooking ninja behind my last three cookbooks—and San Francisco Cooking School student Lauren Godfrey. Lauren just happens to be a former creative director of an ad agency who just happens to be a culinary school student now staging at SPQR (I’m just saying—she’s not exactly twiddling her thumbs). We hit the tester jackpot with her: She’s creative, aesthetically-driven, detail oriented, and die-hard T-lish fan to boot (scroll down to the “five things [she] can’t live without”—something Joe and I stumbled across while Google stalking her).

This duo is making sure that the recipes work for normal people. People who don’t happen to cook for a living, or work in massive quantities, or have walk-in refrigerators, or prep cooks, or grills at the ready, or meat and produce deliveries, or human dishwashers. (Ok, well, for the latter job there’s my dad, but you know what I mean.)
Being a recipe tester is not glamorous. First you have to shop for the ingredients, schlep them all home, cook the recipes to the tee (weighing things, timing things, measuring things, generally being anal), and then clean up. And often the recipe doesn’t work the first time around. It might be too spicy—but then, really, what does too spicy mean? This has turned out to be an existential question I’m having to grapple with. The recipe might not yield enough, it might be too complicated, it might not blend up in the blender. In these cases, the tester has to buck up and do it all over again. Like you were dying to have another 3 cups of habanero salsa.

On the upside, being a recipe tester also garners you a lot of friends. Read more »

Tacolicious Gets on the Road with GM

by Sara Deseran under Uncategorized with No Comments

Monday, May 13, 2013

GM invited Tacolicious to lead them on a “Good Taste Tour” of San Francisco and visit some of our cohorts in the business—from the folks at Nopalito to Hoss Zare at Zare at Flytrap (Hossy Hugs all around!). Thank you, GM, for letting Telmo drive a Cadillac and look like a baller. But just because Joe got the Volt doesn’t mean he’s any less of a man. Just check out his serious knife skills.

Your Cinco de Mayo? Booked.