"What the world knows as traditional Mexican food really is a melting pot of cultures and people that have come together over the few hundreds of years of colonisation," explains the chef and culinary anthropologist.
"Without migration and colonisation, the food of Mexico wouldn't be what it is today. It would be as beautiful, a gorgeous Indigenous cuisine, but what most consider traditional cuisine is a melting pot of Italian, British, German, Jewish, Moroccan and Middle Eastern immigrant cultures."
Claudette Zepeda cooks torta ahogada on The Cook Up. Credit: Jiwon Kim
In 2022, she launched the pop-up in Sydney, where she slung tacos on hand-pressed tortillas. While she loved her time in Australia, finding the right ingredients wasn't easy. "I did struggle. I just had to make some slight changes. When I couldn’t get fresh tomatillos and poblanos, sometimes I'd get them in a can. I would just adapt," she says.
She says cooking Mexican dishes can be more of a challenge in Australia than in the United States, so she suggests keeping a few staples on hand to make things easier.
"You can't not have tomatoes of some form. If you can’t get tomatillos, which technically are a gooseberry, use a good unripened green tomato. which has that same level of acidity," she says. "When we had the pop-up in Australia, I would use the canned tomatillos and mix them with fresh lime juice to get that acidity, because, in a can, they have a more muted flavour."
What the world knows as traditional Mexican food really is a melting pot.
Chillis are another essential; fresh serranos and poblanos, and dried ancho pepper and chile de árbol, "to bring the heat to the party".
"We are a very herb-based cuisine so get any herbs you can get your hands on," she adds. Coriander features, of course, but also Mexican oregano, bay leaf and avocado leaves, which are a must when she cooks beans.
Zepeda has some Australian friends who grow epazote , a pungent herb that tastes like a mix of anise, oregano, citrus and mint.
Don't call a torta a sandwich
When chatting about the torta ahogada that she prepared for Adam Liaw on , I refer to the dish as a sandwich, but Zepeda tells me that a is not a sandwich. She explains that in Mexico, a sandwich is made with sliced bread.
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Torta ahogada
"The torta ahogada is a classic Jalisco-style baguette type of bread stuffed with carnitas or some sort of braised pork, smeared with beans and doused in a red tomato-based sauce and accompanied with a very spicy chile de árbol salsa," she describes.
A cookbook on the food culture of the border
At the time of our interview, Zepeda was in the middle of shooting photos for which is set to come out around July 2025.
It's called Borderlands and it's about the food of the border, from San Diego and Tijuana to the corner of Texas.
"From the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, our food has changed as it exchanges hands from one side of the border to the other; and the different cultures that make this so special, including the Indigenous people."
