Mexico: The Cookbook

It's my third book purchase of Phaidon cooking series, first Mexican book ever, and they've all been an absolute hit.What can I say about this one? It's beautifully decorated, really brings out the colourful look of Mexico and Mexican cuisine, makes me happy to even open it.But be warned - Mexican cuisine is quite unique, a lot of ingredients you can only find online for quite a sum of money, at least in the UK, making it impossible to even try some of the recipes. Those unique ingredients include, vast range of dried chiles (ancho, guajillo, chipotle, jalepeno, poblano, serrano), fresh epazote leaves, tomatillos... You can substitute them with others, they will still make amazing dishes, but they will not be quite as authentic. But don't get sad, I still cooked plenty of recipes from the book and they're absolutely amazing!

A Mexican Cuisine Anthology!Every recipe you could ever imagine from all over Mexican regions.Packed with dishes,My only negative is the lack of photos, there are lots - but I’d say 1 photo to every 10 recipesAmazing book nonetheless & you’ll probably never need to buy another Mexican book.

It was a gift for someone who has every cookbook under the sun and she liked it a lot.Very nice layout & design and the recipes are apparently very good.However, some of the recipe ingredients can be hard to find, even for a very experienced cook living in London where you can get almost anything.If you don't have access to a range of 'world foods' from local suppliers, you may need to look through the book thoroughly before you buy.

This book is crazily comprehensive and it's so big that it's bigger than two to three average cookbooks. The cover is beautiful and the pages are thick, although they're not glossy so watch them with food splats. Also - it's so big that it struggles to sit on my cast iron cookbook stand. Just something to bare in mind.I can't comment on how authentic this is, but I can say that there is such a wide variety of Mexican dishes in here that you would struggle to get bored of this book.Here's why I only gave it four stars:There is not a picture for every dish, in fact, there's probably only a picture for every 10-20 dishes. I don't expect one for every single dish in a book of this size, but for some of the recipes it would be nice to see what the finished dish is supposed to look like.There is no description or introduction to any of the recipes, just a name. This leaves you scanning ingredients and cooking instructions to try and get an idea of what the dish is. This coupled with no pictures makes this book rather long winded to use.I would recommend this, but bare in kind the lack of pictures and introductions. Otherwise, it's fantastic. The small amount of pictures that are included are beautiful and the sheer amount and variety of recipes is staggering. It's all bound in a beautiful cover with great quality paper, this really is a fantastic book. In fact, it's more of a Mexican food encyclopedia. Even if the recipes aren't authentic, it's still amazing! I would love to see a revised edition with some more pictures added, or just some introductions to the dishes. With no pictures and no description, a fair bit of googling is required to figure out what it is that you fancy cooking!

Beautiful book, nice to have. Haven't made anything yet but pretty much every other page I want to try. Yes it's got some ingredients that are not readily available in the supermarket (although never noticed before that W. actually sell dried ancho and chipotle chillies), but being a foodie I don't mind having to order them off the internet to try and get the authentic taste described in the book. And maybe substitute them sometimes when the ingredient is not available. I've even looked at growing my own tomatillos.If I had to say anything negative; it would have been nice to have a small description with the dishes. But in the age of internet that is only a small problem.

LOVE the book. Great price, shopping, delivery. Tons of authentic info, great book if you need a Mexican food Bible, this is one of the best.

Massive volume of recipes

The book is amazing in terms of variety of recipes and they all are authentic from Mexico. However, because the recipes are so authentic it is pretty much impossible to get full list of ingredients to make something. The items required for some even basic recipes are impossible to just pop out and get from the supermarket or easily replace. So unless you live in Mexico or next door to specialised Mexican shop I would reeeeeealy consider if this book is worth it.Also some of the directions are a bit vague, for example the book recommends to cook the chicken - boil, fry, roast or how exactly you are supposed to cook it does not bother explaining.If you want to get it for someone as a gift - it does look impressive and wraps in a big bundle :D