Cocina Puerto Rico: Recipes from My Abuela’s Kitchen to Yours

Rooted in family cooking and shaped by professional training, this book celebrates the everyday food of Puerto Rico. Though Mia Castro trained under chefs like José Andrés, Thomas Keller, and Wolfgang Puck, the recipes here come first from her own family—collected during long conversations with her grandmother in San Juan and refined with a chef’s eye for clarity and consistency.

The focus is on the island’s home cooking: garbanzos criollos con chorizo, garlicky citrus-bright yuca, layered rice with picadillo and crusty cheese, and classic pasteles made from yuca or plantain and filled with savory stews like crab in tomato sauce. A small number of original dishes—such as a sazón-packed bean dip and a guava-studded bread pudding with a spirited, salty headnote—reflect Castro’s contemporary sensibility without straying from Puerto Rican flavor.

When techniques are more involved, including the assembly of pasteles, step-by-step photo sequences make the process approachable. The book spans savory dishes, rice, seafood, and sweets, including bakery favorites, with photography shot in San Juan that underscores the food’s sense of place.

Warm, practical, and grounded in lived experience, this is a book about how Puerto Rican food is actually cooked at home—generous, deeply seasoned, and inseparable from family and memory.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.