How-To Video: What is a Molcajete?

Melissa Guerra, one of TLK’s featured chefs, is an 8^th generation Texan, and self-taught culinary expert and food historian living in San Antonio. Melissa will be sharing her recipe secrets with TLK in a series of how-to videos that familiarize home cooks with Latin kitchen staples and recreate authentic Latin dishes. In this video, Melissa tackles the classic Latin cooking tool, the molcajete. Molcajetes are a standby in Latin kitchens, used in making delicious and authentic salsas and guacamoles and helping in the prep work of grinding spices. 

Below, Melissa tells TLK viewers everything they need to know about molcajetes. 

Melissa Guerra, born and raised on a working cattle ranch in South Texas, specializes in the foods of the Americas, especially Texas regional, Mexican, and Latin American cuisine. A cooking course instructor and public speaker, Guerra owns andoperates a website and storefront, The Latin Kitchen Market, dedicated to providing top quality Latin American kitchenware and ingredients. Her newest store at the Pearl Brewery in San Antonio—also the location of the new Culinary Institute of America’s Center for Foods of the Americas—was designated as the #1 shopping destination in San Antonio, the #3 shopping destination in the United States by Lonely Planet Guidebook (2011).  Guerra’s cookbook Dishes from the Wild Horse Desert: Norteño Cuisine of South Texas (Wiley, 2006) was a finalist for a James Beard Award in the category of Foods of the Americas, and an International Association of Culinary Professionals award in the same category.

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