If you’ve been into Wahaca recently, you might have spotted the first of our new Dash of Wahaca salsas which have landed on the tables in the last few weeks.

Designed to be splashed on liberally

It’s been a labour of love but for the last year Tommi has been working tirelessly on the recipes with a specialist company who has created the great looking bottles for us. To give you an idea of the amount of effort that has gone into each one, just check out the list of ingredients – All of which are totally natural with no nasty preservatives anywhere in sight. In fact, if you have a look, you can see all of the little bits of chopped up herbs and spices swimming around inside the bottle.

Tommi has made 3 salsas for us to start off with. A brand new searingly hot chile de arbol sauce and new (and even tastier) versions of our yellow habanero and our smoky chipotle chile salsas that have been used on the tables in the last few years. So now there are 3 very different flavoured salsas each with a different level of spicines for you to choose from.

The brilliant news is, if you want to take some with you to give your home cooking a dash of Wahaca (see what we’ve done there?), you can buy them in our restaurants for £2.50 a bottle, just ask one of the waiters. Over the next few weeks, we’ll post a couple of recipes on the website so that you can discover some new ways of spicing things up in your own kitchen.

As always, we’d love to hear from anyone who’s tried them out already. What do you think of the new bottles? Do you have a favourite? Would they make the perfect Christmas present? (Yes they would).

We’re always looking for new ways to come up with recipes and to use different cuts of meat at Wahaca, so a couple of days ago Tommi invited all of our chefs over to her house for a day of butchery and recipe development.

Our lovely butcher brought along half a pig, along with a couple of more random cuts to see what we could come up with. It was brilliant to see all of the chefs’ minds whirring at the same time and the results were as tasty as you might imagine.

Dishes included Elki’s rather scary sounding pig head tortas, drowned in chipotle salsa (‘tortas ahogadas’ to you and me) and Leo’s slightly less Mexican, but no less delicious pork and herb sausages! There was also Mexican Pozole, chicken liver tacos and beef cheeks cooked in a red mole.

Are there any Mexican inspired dishes that you would love to see us try out for the Wahaca Menu? Or indeed that you’ve tried out yourselves and would like to share with the team? Don’t be shy.

Last night saw Tommi hosting our first ‘in-house’ cooking demo in our brand spanking new Soho bar, to celebrate the launch of The Observer Food Monthly’s brand new book “Cook: A Year in the Kitchen with Britain’s Favourite Chefs”. 

We were delighted to welcome the editor, Rebecca Seal to introduce the book.  She gave an eye-opening peek behind the scenes of what it’s like to put together a cookbook with contributions from over 80 of Britain’s best loved chefs. No easy task by the sound of it!

Tommi made child’s play of our brand new demo equipment, elegantly splicing together an amazing range of salsas – Chipotles in Adobo, Roast Chipotle Salsa and Chipotle Mayonaise – Who knew Chiptole could create such amazing flavour?! They were all delicious and can be found throughout our menu if you look closely.

But we’re not just telling you this to make you jealous, you can join in the fun too. The Observer & Guardian Book Store  have very kindly offered you, the good readers of our blog, a chance to buy the book for half the normal price. All you have to do is visit their website and pop the code “Wahaca” into the field marked ‘promotional code’, then start impressing your pals with a whole range of seasonal treats throughout the year.

Whilst we’re on the subject of books, if you did fancy cooking up your own version of Tommi’s salsas, then you can learn all about them in her book, Mexican Food Made Simple, which you can find nestled nicely here. It’s really rather good.

So that’s this year’s Christmas shopping sorted then.  Inspired by the markets of Mexico you could say.

Stevie is an old friend who I met at Ballymaloe, rather a long time ago now. He is an amazing cook with a passion for exotic spices from around the world, beautiful ingredients and unfussy food. The result is a wonderful mix of simply presented food from around the world, never with too many ingredients competing for attention. His flair with spices produces some sensational marinades, delicious chutneys and daals and he makes a mean biryani. One day he is going to teach me how to make his chaat masala too.

He occasionally lets me come and play at the Dock with him. A coulple of weeks ago we cooked Mexican together. We sat down with three-week old Samuel, his first-born and devised a menu together which we cooked all of this week at the Dock (I only did Tuesday and Wednesday as had other menus to do at Wahaca).

It’s a delight cooking there, as like Petersham Nurseries, you can just pop out of the kitchen to the herb garden to pick whatever herb you think might make all the difference to your chillie paste, sauce or soup…

The kitchen is also completely open lined with glass, rather than the conventional walls. How Stevie moved from the River Cafe, with all that beautiful light, to the only other kitchen in London that I know of, that is also an ode to light, is beyond me, but fairly typical of his natural jamminess. On August 21st they are closing for a fortnight and building a souped up kitchen courtesy of Wolf/Sub-zero, possibly the sexiest, coolest kitchen makers in the world, and the restaurant will double the number of seats it has to 80. What excitement.

Meanwhile a brief sypnopsis of our menu. We started with some corn which we shaved off the cobb and sauteed with sweet onion, garlic, a chipotle paste I made and masses and masses of butter. The result, a sweet, smoky, fiery filling for a white corn taco. It was so popular that I think I am going to put it on the wahaca menu next summer. Yum.

Next up was courgettes, a thoroughly Mexican vegetable, sauteed with girolles and summer herbs…

And then a plate of octopus which we rolled in crumbed crisy pig skin, deep-fried and served with a fruity, fiery habanero salsa…

This recipe was thanks to a friend Roberto Solis of the restaurant Nectar in Merida. Totally yummy, thanks for the idea Roberto, I hope you are enjoying Noma this week, you lucky so-and-so.

We did a sopa de guia next, which is a broth flavoured with wild herbs and leaves, which I first had at Casa Oaxaca, cooked by the wonderful Alejandro Ruiz…

And finally a slow-cooked shoulder of saltmarsh lamb, marinaded in ancho, chile de arbol and pasilla de oaxaca chillies and slow cooked over a bed of carrots, celery and onions and served with the classic shredded cabbage, radish and coriander slaw.

The pudding, which I failed to capture (please excuse my crummy photographs) was blackcurrant, hibiscus and tequila made by the lovely Hannah (ex-Ballymaloer) and Mexican wedding cookies made by the equally lovely Lewen (also ex-Ballymaloer maybe?). I had to go back to take these picces on Thursday, when I was no longer cooking and bumped into Mary Portas, Queen of Shops, who was eating there! Quelle excitement! I love Mary’s love of independent shops, what a woman. She was looking as stylish as ever.
So all in all an idyllic week, cooking with Stevie’s amazing team (here is Stevie and Lewen).

Creating food, talking to great people and feeling that life is good.

Thanks so much for having me guys, good luck with the refurb and thanks for the cooking tips.

tommi xxx

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I’ve just returned from the most amazing week of cooking, eating and fishing in Los Cabos, Baja California, Mexico. An amazing trip where I learnt the secret to a great batter for fish tacos, how to cook mole negro and the delights of a good recado blanco (from the Yucatan).

Fishing was amazing. We went with Angelo, the chef behind Nick-San, possibly the best sushi restaurant I’ve ever been to. Last week we had the steamed head of a wahoo and some deep-fried seabass and snapper at his place with an evil habanero sauce, but that’s for another blog post. Here is him making up some ceviche and sashimi on a boating trip we went on…

and here is me eating, as usual…

Here is a plate of the delicious sashimi which Angelo whipped up in a flash (nothing to do with me I’m afraid, though the soy-serrano dressing I have made once or twice before and yes, it is yummy)…

Finally here is a picture of one of the beaches we visited… it is ridiculously beautiful and unlike my last ten trips to Mexico, this time I managed to get out of the kitchen and actually hit a Mexican beach! My first one in six years….at last!

Thanks to everyone who helped me make the trip so much fun! More stories to follow soon.

tommi x

We’ve just had our second round of menu testing for the new winter menu to launch in early October and I have been dreaming of some of the dishes since… below are a few of my favourite. 

Vegetable Tacos

Our new menu will be more seasonal than before and I am just loving the introduction of roasted squash to the Autumn Veg Tacos along with autumn greens, ancho chillies and  other goodies.

Then as the weather gets colder we will introduce the winter greens and mushrooms – topped off with a little Feta which has a richer flavour. These will keep you happy and warm through the winter months…

And the best of them all…

Tommi and our team of chefs created a new dish that we are really hoping to get on the menu as a main course. Our fish always has to be sourced from the best sources – and at the moment we still have a bit of work getting the prices down on this dish. It may not get on this menu but we are working hard at it! This dish has lemon sole goujons (from an MSC certified source) in tortillas served with salad, tomato salsa, chipotle crema with rice and Wahaca coleslaw on the side…

We have a little more testing to do with some of the fish dishes as we experiment with grilled or baked options. We also aim to get as much MSC certified fish on our menu. We will update you on this shortly.

Our new menu is set to go live towards the beginning of October so we were testing some new dishes in the White City kitchen the other day. There were a few things we were playing with.

Vegetable Taco

For our seasonal vegetable taco we were debating whether to go back to the savoy cabbage/ mushroom mix that we’ve had before. Or trying it with seasonal greens (spring greens at the moment). Firstly we made a rich chilli sauce with ancho chilli’s, which have a slightly sweeter flavour than the pasilla chilli’s we have used previously. Then we cooked off our veg on the flat top and mixed it with the chilli sauce.

It has quite a meaty taste to it, thanks to the mushrooms and the rich ancho sauce.

Chilli Squash Winter Burrito

We used fresh butternut squash which we dice, mix with a little cumin and our home made mojo de ajo (a potent garlic concoction) and roast it in the oven. Really delicious in a vegetarian burrito.

Black Bean Tostada

The black bean tostada omes from our intense love of our frijoles and black beans. It’s such a simple snack, but so delicious. In our first attempt, we took a tostada (fried pure corn tortilla) topped it with some frijoles, shredded lettuce, salsa fresca, crema, and Lancashire cheese.

It was a very tasty combo, but perhaps not the most attractive looking tostada. Especially since I was a little over generous with the frijoles and it started oozing over the sides.

The second more attractive attempt created by Tommi and Gavin, utilised our whole black beans, and corn, which gave it some welcome texture and a meatier, more robust consistency.

Our next step is testing different MSC approved seasonal fish for the menu – something we are really passionate about and keen to get right. If you’ve got a point of view on what we’re up to let us know by leaving a comment.

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The world of Wahaca revolves around what happens in the kitchen. Our team of chefs are incredibly talented and are frequently devloping new recipes and coming up with new ideas. We are going to share our favourite stories with you here as and when they happen.

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