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Maricel Presilla head shot - Epicurious

Maricel Presilla

Cookbook Author

Maricel E. Presilla specializes in the foods of Latin America and Spain and is the first Latin American woman to have been invited as a guest chef at the White House. She was nominated twice for James Beard Foundation journalism awards for articles written for Saveur. She has also contributed frequently to Food & Wine and Gourmet, and has written the column Cocina for the Miami Herald since 2003. Presilla is a four-time James Beard Foundation Award nominee and won Best Chef Mid-Atlantic on 7 May 2012. A year later, on 4 May 2013, her book Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America was named Cookbook of the Year by the James Beard Foundation. The International Association of Culinary Professionals chose Gran Cocina Latina as the best general book that same year. Presilla was the chef and co-owner of Cucharamama, a long-standing fixture of Hoboken, New Jersey, until its closure in 2020.

Presilla is the president of Gran Cacao, a food marketing company specializing in chocolate research and the heirloom cacao bean trade. She has been a consultant for several food companies, including the Venezuela-based Chocolates El Rey C.A., whose premium chocolates she helped introduce to the United States. In 2012, she was appointed the chairman of the newly created Felipe Rojas-Lombardi Memorial Scholarship Fund of the James Beard Foundation and is a board member of the Fine Chocolate Industry Association. She holds a doctorate in medieval Spanish history from New York University and has received formal training in cultural anthropology. She taught at Rutgers University in their history department.

Recipes & Menus

Caldo de Frijoles Negros

This hearty black bean soup gets lots of heat and flavor from a purée of chipotle peppers and garlic.
Recipes & Menus

Sopa de Lima Yucateca

Lima, or sweet limes, are the key to the citrus flavor of sopa de lima Yucateca, but bitter orange also works well in this Mexican soup.
Recipes & Menus

Coquito

Add the creamy Puerto Rican coconut and rum drink known as coquito to your festive cocktail rotation and enjoy throughout the holiday season.
Recipes & Menus

Achiote-Infused Oil (Aceite de Color)

In Latin America, achiote-colored lard or achiote-infused oil is part of any well-stocked pantry, traditionally stored in an achiotera, a special metal container with a spout. My friend and mentor Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, the brilliant Peruvian-born chef and author who created the Ballroom restaurant in Manhattan, loved the sunny color and subtle smoky flavor of achiote-infused olive oil. He used it for everything from marinating the luscious suckling pigs that he proudly displayed at the counter of his tapas bar to enhancing the color of his spicy mayonnaise to giving his lamb empanadas a gilded look. This recipe gives you both a seasoning and a coloring.
Recipes & Menus

Puerto Rican-Style Ají Dulce Sauce (Ajilimójili)

Editor's note: Use this with Maricel Presilla's Boiled Yuca (Yuca Hervida) . Ajilimójili (ah-hee-lee-MOH-hee-lee) is the wonderful whimsical name for this Puerto Rican–inspired sauce. How to translate this tongue-twister? It seems that it is a composite of the words ajo (garlic) and moje (sauce), but much more can be drawn from it. In Cuba and the Mexican state of Tabasco, ajilimójili is a colloquialism for the Castilian Spanish intríngulis, a hidden reason that is suddenly revealed, or the workings necessary to pull something off, or the key to making a difficult feat look simple. Why was this sauce called ajilimójili? Perhaps because it has its own ajilimójili—the "inner workings" to make any food it touches splendid. Serve with Puerto Rican Pasteles .
Recipes & Menus

Boiled Yuca (Yuca Hervida)

Editor's note: Pair this with Maricel Presilla's Puerto Rican–Style Ají Dulce Sauce (Ajilimójili) . Boiled yuca is a small miracle. I can hardly think of another vegetable so transformed just by simple boiling. The impenetrable tuber, which starts out fibrous and as hard as the tusk of an elephant, becomes a creamy and supple vegetable. Boiled yuca is also the stuff with which many other preparations start, and you will come back to it time and again. There is no single rule that will help you figure out how much time it will take to cook fresh yuca until fork-tender. A general estimate is 30 minutes, but it might take less time or much longer, depending on the type of yuca. Start testing the vegetable with a fork 15 minutes after the water comes to a boil and continue to test until you reach the desired texture. Usually I prefer to remove the central spindle after rather than before cooking. It takes some force to whack through it when you're cutting the raw yuca into chunks, but it is much easier to detach the spindle from cooked yuca. Serve the yuca with a sauce of your choice or with just a sprinkling of olive oil and some salt.
Recipes & Menus

Hibiscus Sauce (Sirope de Flor de Jamaica)

Recipes & Menus

Cuban Avocado, Watercress, and Pineapple Salad (Ensalada de Aguacate, Berro, y Piña)

Watercress is the green of choice in Cuba, its peppery taste a perfect foil for the avocado and the sweet pineapple in this classic Cuban salad. I serve it with shrimp in a spicy tomato sauce called enchilado de camarones. In Cuba, the pineapple is never roasted, but this technique adds another dimension of flavor I find very appealing.
Recipes & Menus

Puerto Rican Pasteles (Pasteles Puertorriqueños)

The Christmas season in Puerto Rico is blessed with balmy weather and clear skies. There is nothing like dining under the shade of a gourd tree on Christmas Eve, savoring every morsel of the earthy tamales called pasteles and adobo-flavored pork while looking at the sea. Puerto Rican women get together with their families to prepare pasteles by the hundred, freezing them until needed for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, family reunions, the Fiesta de Reyes, and the religious season called octavas that follows the Feast of the Epiphany. It is the blend of the tiny pepper ají dulce and broad-leaf culantro in the fragrant sofrito (cooking sauce) that gives an unmistakable Puerto Rican identity to these earthy tamales. A dash of vinegar lends the sofrito just the right amount of tang against the mild dough of malanga and plantain tinted orange-yellow with achiote-infused lard. I learned to make these in the traditional kitchen of the Puerto Rican side of my family. While one person took care of trimming the plantain leaves, others were busy grating the vegetables and making the sofrito. There the vegetables are grated by hand, though you can find machines designed specially for this purpose in any market or use a food processor. Puerto Ricans are extremely fussy about the wrapping—it has to be perfect and watertight because pasteles are normally boiled. But I prefer to steam them.
Recipes & Menus

Moors and Christians (Moros y Cristianos)

For seven centuries, Moors and Christians fought one another in Spain, but in the guise of black beans and rice they surrendered to each other's charms within the all-embracing New World pot. Like the hybrid culture that flourished in medieval Spain, the rice dish known as moros y cristianos is an exemplar of exchange between civilizations. It is feast food in Cuba, where you'll find it in the western provinces. Considering that there is a Veracruzan version of this dish and that Cuba always imported black beans from Mexico, we are left in doubt as to which version came first. Regardless of its place of birth, it is one of the most felicitous rice and bean combinations I have ever tasted. The flavors of all the other ingredients are absorbed seamlessly by the rice, the vinegar providing point and counterpoint to the mealy beans, the aroma of cumin and oregano a subtle backdrop for the meaty smoked bacon, which in turn joins forces with the olive oil to add aroma and sheen to the rice. And then the color, a dark brown or hybrid of white and black.
Recipes & Menus

Santiago de Cuba's Roast Pork Marinated in a Garlicky Allspice-Cumin Adobo (Cerdo Brujo)

This heirloom family recipe has the distinctive allspice aroma of the cooking of my hometown, Santiago de Cuba, the only part of Cuba where this complex spice is used in a pork marinade. The combination of cumin and allspice is especially characteristic of my family's cooking. Originally a Christmas dish, cerdo brujo is now one of the most popular dishes at my restaurant Zafra, where we celebrate Christmas every day.
Recipes & Menus

Creamy Chocolate-Cheese Flan with Hibiscus Sauce

I love how the fruitiness of Cluizel Concepción chocolate, mellowed by a little cream cheese, plays against the caramel and the flowery, slightly musky acidity of the blossoms (actually, calyces) called "Jamaica flowers" in Mexico and red hibiscus in this country. (They are what gives Red Zinger tea its color.) When I first developed this recipe, I used hibiscus to flavor the caramel, but now I include it in a separate sauce where its red color makes a gorgeous contrast with the dark flan. You will find that this flan is reminiscent of the classic cream cheese–fruit paste pairing that Latin Americans like in other contexts. For this recipe, do not use the spice marketed as "cinnamon" in American stores (it's really cassia). Look for the soft, flaky true cinnamon from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), which has a much subtler and more delicate flavor. You can find it in Hispanic markets under the name canela.
Recipes & Menus

Maricel's Mojo

This garlicky sauce is the traditional accompaniment to the starchy root vegetables of the Hispanic Caribbean, especially Cuba. The acidic medium is usually Seville, or bitter, orange juice, though lime juice or white vinegar can be substituted. The mojo is at its best spooned or brushed over piping-hot boiled yuca, plantains, or other starchy tropical vegetables.
Recipes & Menus

Chocolate-Garlic Mojo with Toasted Cuban Bread (Tostadas de Pan Cubano con Mojo de Chocolate)

A sensuous variation on the theme of bread and chocolate is a silky ganache flavored with a garlicky Cuban-style olive oil mojo, smeared over slices of Cuban bread. Because the ingredients are so few and basic, it is important to use a not-too-bitter premium chocolate. I also like the effect of a mellow Spanish extra-virgin olive oil made with Arbequina olives, with their slight accent of apple peel. Sea salt sprinkled on the bread right at the moment of serving brings out all the flavors.
Recipes & Menus

Fanesca (Ecuadorean Lenten Chowder)

FANESCA Maricel Presilla, chef-owner of the restaurant Zafra in Hoboken, New Jersey, first offered fanesca — a more elaborate rendition of the streamlined dish here — during Holy Week. Now it's one of the restaurant's most popular weekend specials year-round. Traditional accompaniments include bolitas de harina (flour fritters), fried plantains, and bottled hot sauce.