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For Esteban Castillo, aka @chicanoeats, cooking began as a necessity. Long before he became the award-winning cookbook author he is today, Castillo was a college student like any other college student: far from home, missing the nightly mom-made meals he once took for granted, and hungry.
“I grew up in Southern California and lived there for my entire life until I moved away for college way up north in Humboldt County,” he recalls. “I was about a 13-hour drive from home, basically stranded in the middle of nowhere. I could count the number of Mexican restaurants on one hand. It was a really big culture shock.”
Castillo’s parents were immigrants from the western Mexican state of Colima, where his grandparents ran (and still run) a restaurant out of their backyard. He grew up in Santa Ana, California, where more than three-quarters of the population is Latino, and the food he ate at home reflected that: frijoles de la olla, mole, pozole, birria, agua fresca, and agua de arroz (a horchata-like beverage with lime that is his mom's specialty).
Once he went north, he’d call up his mom and other family members to ask for comfort food recipes. “But they would just say, ‘Add a little bit of this or a little bit of that,’ which made me feel even more confused,” he recalls. So Castillo threw himself in the kitchen, relying on muscle memory and instinct.
“I had to tap back into being a kid: spending time with my grandparents who cook for a living; having to sit there while they're making tacos,” Castillo says. “I realized that I had absorbed a lot of knowledge. I just had to start cooking to realize that I already knew what I was doing.”
One of the first things Castillo remembers making for himself is chile rellenos. “If you've never made them before, it is a very lengthy process,” he says. “But sure enough, I caught myself midway, realizing I was on autopilot, making this dish the same way that I had always seen my parents and my grandparents make it. It was kind of amazing. It's why I started to cook.”
In college, Castillo majored in public relations with a minor in graphic design. Because his studies fell under the journalism department, he also had to join one of the student publications. Not seeing one that felt fully representative of his demographic, he decided to help a friend start a new bilingual newspaper.
“It was called El Leñador, and it's still going very strong today. I was the art director, so I took care of the layout, but then I also ended up pitching a column called ‘Mi Cocina, Mi Sazon,’ where I would showcase a different Latin American recipe every time we went to print,” he says. “That's where I got started writing about food too.”
The food writing took a backseat after Castillo graduated from college and started a full-time marketing job for a federal nonprofit, but he hated the work. “Everything had to follow very strict guidelines and rules,” he says. “There really wasn't leeway for any sort of creativity.”
Castillo’s husband encouraged him to start a food blog as an outlet for this pent-up creativity (and the cooking, photography, and food writing skills he’d picked up in college), and Chicano Eats was born.
“Back in college, when I was searching online for recipes, it felt like a very ‘mommy blogger’ dominated space, and I couldn’t relate to any of the voices or recipes that were out there,” he says. “So it was kind of like a no-brainer to focus my blog on the foods I grew up eating. I wanted to create a resource that would be helpful to that same kid that I was in college, leaving their family for the first time and probably having a hard time getting these recipes.”
The blog, launched in the fall of 2016, took off fast.
“Chicano Eats became an outlet for me to vent my feelings and share stories,” Castillo says. “I remember a specific post right after the election, talking about the way I felt as a kid and how I was being brought back to similar feelings of being shunned for speaking Spanish on the playground. It was like a regression to a time where I felt shame for being ‘other.’”
A lot of people connected with that post, and with the blog as a whole. Castillo established a particularly strong kinship with fellow first-generation Mexican Americans, stuck in that familiar push-pull of living between two cultures.
“We feel like we don't fit in either here or there, because to the people here we're not American enough because we speak Spanish, but in Mexico we’re not Mexican enough because we were born in the U.S. and also speak English.”
This bicultural lens colors the way Castillo cooks. “I not only showcase traditional Mexican recipes, but I also like to take traditional Mexican ingredients and use them in non-traditional ways,” he says. “My mom's approach to cooking when I was a kid is the same way that I started approaching food when I launched Chicano Eats.”
Castillo recalls childhood summers in the backyard, where his family had a pool. “We would ask for burgers and my mom would make what she thought were burgers, where she would take ground beef and chop up cilantro, fold it in, and then instead of making patties, she would put a ball of ground beef in the tortilla press and press it down so it was almost like a smashburger. It would be so thin, but just seeing how she was able to adapt her recipes to the things that she had access to in SoCal at the time was fun and liberating. In the same way, my recipes mirror my identity as a Mexican American.”
When he began work on his first cookbook, also titled “Chicano Eats,” Castillo’s hope was simply to build upon what he was already doing with the blog: to compile a resource that would be helpful to anybody, at any stage in their cooking game. “I made sure to pack that book with all of the staple recipes: stovetop beans, rice recipes, mole, pozole...”
But to Castillo’s surprise, the part of the book that people immediately gravitated toward was the desserts chapter. “When the book came out in June of 2020, I had a dulce de leche chocoflan that went viral,” he says. “I was like, ‘I don't understand why people are in the kitchen baking in the middle of the summer, but you know what? I love it.’”
This gravitation — and an overwhelmingly positive response from readers and critics alike — sowed the seeds for his next cookbook, “Chicano Bakes,” which focuses entirely on Mexican American desserts. The publisher initially pushed back on the idea, saying they didn’t think there was an audience or a need for a book entirely based around Mexican sweets. But Castillo persisted.
“I'm thinking to myself, ‘It's really crazy that this is the response that I'm getting. Other people are able to reinvent the chocolate chip cookie year after year. We get the same cookie books, pie books, cake books every single year. Why can't I have a slice of that pie?’”
Eventually, with the help of his agent, Castillo succeeded. “Chicano Bakes” dropped in November 2022, and immediately made it onto the New York Times Best Cookbooks of the Year list.
“It was sold out at so many different stores the week that it was published, I couldn't even comprehend it,” he says. “It's such a gift to be able to share these recipes that are hard to come by, and making them accessible to everybody is something that I really pride myself in.”
That’s why Castillo does what he does — out of necessity. “I always have that college Esteban in mind,” he says. “I want to make sure that I am taking care of that person that I was, just trying to navigate my way through the kitchen.”
Here’s Esteban Castillo’s recipe for Mango Agua Fresca:
Makes about 8 cups
Ingredients
1½ lbs ripe mango, diced
6 cups water, divided
1 lime, juiced
Sugar, to taste
Lime wedge, for garnish
Preparation
In a blender combine the mango, 4 cups of water, and the lime juice. Blend for one minute at high speed until everything is smooth.
Strain into a pitcher, then add in the remaining 2 cups of water, then add sugar to taste.
Serve over ice with a lime wedge.
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Esteban Castillo
