After culinary school in Caracas, Herrera worked at restaurants such as Alto in Venezuela and Cosme in Manhattan. Then, last year, he opened Ensenada, where one peek inside the compact but efficient kitchen’s fridge reveals the technicolor components that make up his food. Each salsa, marinade and pickle has its own pint container, the cook’s cabinet of potions ready at his disposal. In my favorite of his creations — this taco de pescado al pastor — he combines four ready-made elements: marinated fish, pineapple pico de gallo, fresh corn tortillas and, what really anchors the dish, an adobo sauce, brick-red and richly layered with chiles.
‘If the chiles in this recipe are the fire, then the pineapple is the ice.’
Adobo means marinade. And in Herrera’s recipe, it will occupy most of your time, but the return on investment couldn’t be higher. The resulting mixture gives a warmth and complexity — a “Hmm, what is that?” — to an otherwise breezy al pastor. Adobo is also a key building block of Mexican cuisine, of which Herrera considers himself a forever student, tasting as much as he can wherever he goes and wherever he cooks, and always, he says, respectfully learning.
If the chiles in this recipe are the fire, then the pineapple is the ice. When he first opened Ensenada, Herrera used pale out-of-season tomatoes that diluted the bright coastal flavors he wanted to showcase in these fish tacos. So he replaced them with diced pineapple and never looked back.
But it’s not just the pineapple that makes this fish al pastor — it’s the char. Al pastor, “in the style of a shepherd,” is a method of barbecuing meat on a rotating vertical spit that Lebanese immigrants brought to Mexico in the late 19th century. Traditionally, a whole peeled pineapple might rest atop layers of pork, like a golden crown that becomes more burnished with every turn of the spit, dripping its golden juices onto the meat. You might not have a rotating vertical spit, called a trompo, in your backyard, but the blazing heat of a grill, coupled with the tongue-prickling heat of the spicy adobo, yields great flavor and honors the source material (the meat).