Rick Bayless's 1996 cookbook contains 78 indexed recipes covering Mexican cuisine, with 66 member recipe reviews averaging 4.2 out of 5 stars. The most frequently reviewed recipes include Essential Chopped Tomato-Serrano Salsa, Classic Red Tomato Rice, and Essential Roasted Tomato-Jalapeno Salsa. The cookbook itself received a 5 out of 5 rating from 2 member book reviews.
Each recipe is long and detailed, with notes on advance preparation, shortcuts and variations. I cannot stress enough how helpful these notes are, and I am surprised more cookbook writers don’t take the same approach. This cookbook also includes mouth-watering photographs.
I love the organization of this book, starting with the various kinds of salsas. Not only are the salsas great tasting, this is also a really nice way to gain an understanding of Mexican food. Bayless is eager to share his deep knowledge of the breadth of this fantastic cuisine and this is a cookbook that can be read cover to cover. Thanks to this book I learned to make my own corn tortillas (using Maseca flour), and knew what to look for in a molcajete. It also helps that we have not had a single dud from this book. We have loved every recipe we have tried. This is cooking from scratch so some of the recipes take quite a bit of time to make and some ingredients may not be available at the local grocery store, but none of the recipes we have tried have been overly difficult to make.