Recipe and Development: The Making of Comal’s Cochinita Pibil
Chef Arden Lewis works with the Comal Heritage Food Incubator participants to create recipes that stay true to their heritage.
Chef and Program Manager Arden Lewis | Photos: Will Blunt
How do you keep the feel and emotion of a home-cooked meal while operating a full-service restaurant? This challenge is put under a microscope at Comal, a culinary incubator that gives immigrant and refugee women a platform to launch their own food businesses. Comal’s culinary program manager, Chef Arden Lewis, helps the participants create a menu that’s true to their heritage and makes sense within the concept’s fast-casual service model.
Lewis works with the participants from square one. The first hurdle is navigating any language barriers that exist within a class of participants, which they call a “cohort.” While classes are taught in English, Lewis does everything he can to make sure the team is on the same page, using translators and supplemental English classes when necessary. “Just because you don’t speak English, shouldn’t mean that you don’t deserve access to knowledge,” says Lewis.
Once a cohort works through the porter phase of the program, they graduate onto the prep cook station, where they focus on prepping and cooking Comal’s current recipes. The name of the game here is understanding the value of standardization—reading recipes, identifying weights and measures, using the kitchen tools, and translating written procedures into techniques. This is all in preparation for the class to write and execute recipes of their own.
interior of comal heritage food incubator
exterior of comal heritage food incubator
Cochinita Pibil | Photo: Joni Schrantz
When Comal is ready to turn over its menu, Lewis has the cohort submit recipes from their home kitchens that satisfy each of the restaurant’s four menu categories: pork, chicken, steak, and veggie. He works with each participant, editing the procedure to make sense in a professional kitchen. “We go through all the stages of the dish—the prep, the pickup, and the plating,” says Lewis. “How you cook it at home is not necessarily how you cook it in a commercial kitchen.”
One of the Comal participants, Maria del Socorro Serratos, had to make adjustments when developing her recipe for cochinita pibil (full recipe here). “Yield, technique, pricing, portion size—a lot of the lessons that the participants learn are that you have to expect some change and a little bit of compromise when you're cooking for paying customers,” says Lewis. Because the stovetop needs to be used for other menu items, the only place to braise the pibil is in the oven rather than on the stovetop. Socorro Serratos also adjusted the salt content, knowing that the longer the pork sits at temperature, the more water that evaporates. All of these changes need to be worked through before a dish can hit the menu. And although this process is designed to create standardized and repeatable recipes, that home-cooked quality—the “I-can’t-stop-eating-this” factor—is alive and well at Comal Heritage Food Incubator.
