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Latin cuisine's big shift: New fusions arise as old culinary borders fall

THE LATEST thing in Latino cooking is a little less Latino. The growing political and cultural clout of American Hispanics has infused the collective American dinner plate with the flavors of the Latino kitchen. And it turns out that culinary cultural exchange goes in both directions.

THE LATEST thing in Latino cooking is a little less Latino.

The growing political and cultural clout of American Hispanics has infused the collective American dinner plate with the flavors of the Latino kitchen. And it turns out that culinary cultural exchange goes in both directions.

As Hispanic communities have grown and increasingly rubbed elbows with neighbors, the American Latino kitchen has changed, too, adopting more of the flavors and ingredients of other cuisines, according to Daisy Martinez, of Food Network's "Viva Daisy!"

The result is an exciting fusion of Hispanic, Asian, Italian and all-American cooking.

"I've had Southern barbecue pulled-pork tacos. I've seen Mexican sushi with jicama and ceviche shrimp," said Ken Rubin, a culinary anthropologist at The International Culinary Schools at The Art Institute of Portland in Oregon. "Cuisines are very fluid.

"In the same way we borrow from Latin foods to create things like the Fiesta Burger, Latin chefs do the same," he said.

While population growth has fueled the change - Latinos make up 15 percent of the U.S. population today and will make up a quarter of it by 2050 - the changing demographics of restaurant kitchens also has played a role.

"The kitchen staff at restaurants has long been Latino," said Martinez. "Now young Latinos are getting classically trained. They're not just line cooks, but executive chefs. So you get the passion of Latin cuisine with the refinement of classical training."

Hoping to expand those numbers, schools such as the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., have courted Latinos. In 2007, for example, the school opened a campus in San Antonio.

Some Hispanic chefs, such as Jose Garces, an Ecuadorian-American who runs several restaurants in Center City, have built careers out of meshing other cuisines with Hispanic cooking.

Garces recently opened Chifa, a Peruvian-Chinese spot inspired by Douglas Rodriguez's nuevo Latino movement, which put haute Latino cuisine on the menu, and the molecular gastronomy of Spanish chef Ferran Adria.

Garces creates dishes such as a traditional hiramasa ceviche topped with a mustard foam.

"We take a traditional cooking style like ceviche and add one culinary technique like the aerated mustard and create something totally different," said Garces. "The use of techniques and applying them to traditional foods is the core of how things have changed."

A public better educated about food also has helped Latino cooks move beyond the conventional.

"It helps Latin kitchens break out of the stereotypes they're put into," said Rubin. "More and more people, especially those who grew up in the '90s, don't have hierarchies of cuisine. Education has helped shake off the assumption that French food or European food in general is the highest cuisine. It's more democratic."

It also can be hugely popular.

In Los Angeles, a Korean taco maker has created a stir with dishes like Korean short ribs soaked in salsa roja and wrapped in a soft tortilla. The Kogi Korean BBQ-To-Go, a food truck that dishes up this fast-food fusion at different locales, serves hundreds of customers a night and the owners recently expanded to a second truck and a taco stand.

"Everyone brings one thing to the table and a whole new thing gets created. If it stays the same, it gets stale," Martinez said. *