Claudette Zepeda nails Mexican food at home

This Mexican-American chef and culinary anthropologist tells us us how to work around a lack of fresh tomatillos, why a torta is not a sandwich, and about her upcoming cookbook.

Credit: Jiwon Kim

Claudette Zepeda wants you to know that Mexican cuisine is complex.

"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

Zepeda has dedicated her career to championing regional Mexican cuisine and native ingredients, as well as exploring immigrant influences. A self-professed "border kid", she has grown up between Tijuana and San Diego, while also spending time in Guadalajara.

In 2022, she launched the pop-up Taqueria Zepeda 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 The Cook Up, I refer to the dish as a sandwich, but Zepeda tells me that a torta is not a sandwich. She explains that in Mexico, a sandwich is made with sliced bread.

"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 her upcoming cookbook, 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."