The Test Kitchen and The Cuban Pantry

All cooking can be summed up by a simple equation: ingredients + process = final dish. The trick to learning to cook the cuisine of a foreign country, particularly a country isolated by trade barriers, is to learn how to substitute ingredients and to understand the chefs’ techniques.

Our first challenge after carefully selecting the paladares and restaurants was to personally speak to each chef to request their recipes. Most of these recipes had never been written down—oral tradition prevailed, passed down from generation to generation—and while the chefs were thrilled to have their favorite dishes recorded in a cookbook, the process of interpreting years of experience and habits into simple-to-follow recipes was very difficult. It was our job to understand and translate, not just Spanish into English, or metric into American measurements, or local Cuban ingredients into those available in the United States, but to really decode each chef’s process and passion, while recording it clearly and faithfully.