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LOS ANGELES IS THE CITY OF ANGELS AND OF TACOS, and Wes Avila, the driving force behind Guerrilla Tacos, probably makes the most famous tacos of them all. Though he's cooked at prestigious restaurants in the country, Avila made his mark slinging uni, duck breast, and sweet potato tacos out of a truck. Since 2012, people have been tracking down the truck all over the city to line up for his genre-bending tacos. His Guerilla Taco recipes, and more, are in Avila's new cookbook with the same name.
While sweet potato tacos might be his most popular dish, the recipe Avila is most fond of in the book is what he calls the Chubbs taco. It's an homage to the tacos his father would whip up after his mother passed away. "He would get a giant spoon of lard and wait for it to get bubbly, scramble an egg in a bowl with some minced onions and fry it like a chile relleno," recalls Avila. "The flavor and the comfort levels that taco has is so good."
In Guerrilla Tacos, Avila spends pages upgrading the nostalgic recipes from his childhood. Take for example the mushroom and fideo taco, essentially a carb-on-carb feast of pasta and tortillas. "The recipe came from eating tortillas with everything as a kid," says Avila. "I know that people do a [fideo] taco in Mexico, and I've seen it there as an adult, but as a kid, my mom would make things like Mexican pasta and we'd get flour tortillas and stuff the pasta in. It was so good."
Avila the adult likes to put morel mushrooms into the mixture of angel hair pasta, Parmesan, and thick salsa. "When morels are in season, they are the fucking best," says Avila. The taco is essentially a cheaper, portable version of the fancy morel pasta dishes high-end Italian places dole out for $36 a bowl. If morels are out of season, Avila recommends swapping them out for oyster mushrooms.
Above all, Avila just wants to you to make the damn taco (or really, any taco out of the book) and all of the salsas. "I wrote this book to show that tacos are very approachable," Avila notes. "People are scared of making salsas... but it's not rocket science, it's just knowing ratios." https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/how-to-make-pasta-taco-mushroom-fideo-recipe/food-and-drink
