Vegan Mexican cookbook ‘Comida Casera’ aims to shatter myths associated with plant-based meals

There are many reasons people alter their diet. Some develop allergies or intolerances, some may decide to be more health-conscious, and some might have moral objections or environmental concerns.

But for a variety of reasons, veganism and vegetarianism has been increasing over the years. As a result, the stigma that a plant-based meal can’t be flavorful and filling has been evaporating.

But another worry some have is that vegan dishes can pull folks away from their culture, which can be deeply connected to their food.

San Antonio chef Dora Ramírez made it her mission to prove this is not the case. Her new cookbook “Comida Casera” examines “more than 100 Vegan Recipes, from Traditional to Modern Mexican Dishes.” In the book, she veganizes her family recipes, traditional Mexican recipes and partnered with Mexico’s indigenous cooks to share their naturally plant-based recipes.

Speaking with the Texas Standard, Ramírez talked about how she was inspired to work on such recipes after her mother was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and shares a few recipes from the book. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: You were born and raised just across the Del Rio border, right?

Dora Ramírez: Yes, I’m from Acuña.

And I gather your family has a restaurant there, but I hear that wasn’t where your passion for cooking actually came from. I read it was when you went to become a nun. You got to tell us about that real quick.

Yes, after high school, I went for a year to become a missionary and I wanted to discern my vocation. And so I was living with nuns and one of my chores was to work in the kitchen. And so that’s kind of what sparked my love for the kitchen, funny enough.

How interesting. Well, let’s talk a bit about this misconception that eating a plant-based diet moves you further away from your culture. You have set out to show that that’s not so. What do you say to folks who have said that sort of thing to you? That “I can’t eat what I grew up on? This sort of gets me away from who I am,” in a sense.

You know, the first thing I said is you should definitely try it because I make a mean pozole. It’s my grandmother’s recipe. It’s my grandmother’s recipe, but I veganized it.

So what do you leave out of pozole and what do you do to replace it?

So instead of meat, I use jackfruit, which is a- I know it sounds weird…

I was going to say, I would have never thought jackfruit.

Yeah, well jackfruit when it’s ripe is very sweet, but when it’s unripe it really doesn’t have flavor. It’s like green Jackfruit.

So the reason why we use it is because it has the texture of meat. You can pull it like meat, so it gives the impression of it being meat. But the flavor really comes from the chili sauce in the pozole.

That is brilliant. How did you come up with that?

You know, jackfruit has been used in veganism for a while now as a meat substitute.

Well, see, I didn’t know. But I think a lot of people don’t know, and that’s kind of at the center of what you’re trying to get at. Give us another example of how you’ve taken a traditional dish and modified it to be plant-based. 

I make this really, really good rajas con crema. And so the crema, which you think would be very hard to make vegan…

So to make it dairy-free, I make the crema out of almonds. And so the almonds go in the blender with a little bit of almond milk, water, lemon juice, garlic, and you blend it all together and it makes a cream sauce.

Wow, it sounds good. I know that there are lots of people out there… Maybe their doctors have told them to cut the meat or the cheese, or incorporate more vegetables into their diet. They might not be willing to go full vegan yet.

But I wonder if there’s a recipe you’ve come up with that might be a good primer for the vegan-curious, if you will.

Yes one of my most popular recipes is my mushroom chorizo. So I make chorizo with mushrooms and crumbled tofu, but it’s the seasoning sauce that really makes the recipe.

So it’s the same traditional chile sauce that’s used to flavor pork chorizo, but I use it to season mushrooms and tofu.

How close to the original flavor can you get using these alternative ingredients?

You know, the funny thing was I was going to say it tastes just like real chorizo.

That’s amazing. Now, you also talk a bit about the concept of decolonizing your food and including indigenous recipes where you partner with someone from the community. Like the mole recipe.

Can you talk about partnering and sharing these indigenous recipes as part of the book?

Yes, I wanted to include indigenous recipes because we can’t really talk about plant-based Mexican food without respecting the origins of the cuisine, which is indigenous cuisine.

And so I didn’t feel like I was qualified to speak about it myself. So then I partnered with Cocineras Tradicionales in Mexico and I traveled there to document their recipes. And these recipes are recipes that are naturally plant-based. They weren’t modified. They’re just recipes that are eaten in that community that just happened to be plant-based.

And so it was a very beautiful experience to learn more about my own background and heritage, but also to be able to share that knowledge with the world.

That is wonderful. Since you have had a lot of experience just looking across the full range of Mexican cuisine, does meat play an outsized role or not so much as you think about it?

In modern culture, it does. A lot of the Mexican dishes are meat-centered. But in the pre-colonial times, the cuisine, I wouldn’t say it was completely plant-based because the indigenous people did eat insects as we know. They also ate wild animals and fish. But the base of the diet was corn.

So they ate a lot of corn – corn tortillas, tamales with vegetables – and then meat was more of a compliment. It wasn’t as meat-centered as it is now.

But there are rural communities in Mexico, especially the very impoverished ones, that do eat a lot of plant-based meals because they can’t afford meat.

» GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE: Sign up for Texas Standard’s weekly newsletters

That’s really interesting. What got you so interested in this style of eating as opposed to sticking with the meat where it does exist in recipes? 

So, I started because of a health problem. But what really got me interested in doing Mexican food vegan was when my mom was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and her doctor was saying that she needed to eat more healthy foods, more plant foods.

And so, I was already vegan at that time and I was like, “mom, you have to do this” and she was like, “no, no, I’m not gonna do this.” And I would try to feed her things that weren’t Mexican. I think I tried to give her tofu and she almost disowned me.

She was the one that told me, “why can’t you just make it Mexican?” And I’m like, “oh, duh.” Yeah, she was right.

Now you wrote this book because, as I understand it, you wish that there was something out there when you first stopped eating meat. I mean, is that ultimately what drew you to making a book? Because that’s quite a leap – from the kitchen to the library.

You know, when I decided to become vegan, it changed my life, it changed my business, it changed my health, and I wanted to tell everyone about it.

And I also wanted everyone to know that you don’t have to give up your abuelita’s pozole, that you don’t have to give up tamales for Christmas – that you can have them. And they’re delicious. You don’t have to miss out.

You don’t have to miss out on sharing the food with your family. And I thought that writing a book was the best way to get it out there for the most people to see.

If you found the reporting above valuable, please consider making a donation to support it here. Your gift helps pay for everything you find on texasstandard.org and KUT.org. Thanks for donating today.