I learned a lot about vegan food and how to make them. I would highly recommend this cookbook.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for a review copy.

Who doesn’t love Mexican food, right? I certainly do—but as a vegetarian, I often find my excitement short-lived due to the limited veggie-friendly options. So imagine my delight when I stumbled upon this cookbook dedicated to plant-based Mexican cuisine! I picked it up without a second thought and can’t wait to dive into several of the recipes.
The book opens with an introductory chapter that gives an insightful overview of Mexican cuisine, touching upon the ingredients commonly used and how local availability has shaped culinary traditions.
The next chapter focuses on building a well-stocked kitchen. It includes a comprehensive list of essential ingredients, complete with handy notes on their uses, recipe suggestions, and helpful tips and tricks.
Then comes the exciting part—six sections covering everything from appetizers and main dishes to desserts, condiments, and salsas. Each recipe is presented with both its original name and its English translation, which is super helpful for non-native speakers like me.
Every dish comes with a brief introduction, serving size, ingredient list, and clear step-by-step instructions.
The vibrant, mouth-watering photos covering most of the recipes make them even more tempting!
Some recipes include a “Freestyle It” section, offering variations, substitutions, and creative ideas to personalize the dish to your taste.
At the end of the book, there’s a resource section listing stores where you can find the ingredients mentioned throughout—very practical!
All in all, this book is a fantastic addition to my cookbook shelf. If you love Mexican food and are on the lookout for vegetarian/ vegan options, this one is definitely worth checking out!

Charming and informative, particularly the detailed explanations of traditional practices and preparation methods. As with the other book in the collection, I believe each recipe deserves its own photo: appearance matters!

Overall I think this was a pretty decent cookbook. As someone from the UK, I did find that a few of the ingredients would be difficult to get and would require relatively pricey online purchases. I tried the retried beans and they were easy to make and really nice - much cheaper than the ones we get pre-made.

As others have said some of the recipes were a little uninspiring, but on the whole there were recipes from each section I would like to give a go.

The information pages were good introductions and would help beginners a lot.

Make It Plant-Based! Mexican is one of a new series of related kitchen guides with recipes, this one featuring plant based Mexican recipes developed and curated by Andrea Aliseda. Due out 13th May 2025 from Hachette on their Workman Publishing imprint, it's 192 pages and will be available in hardcover and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout.

This is a good basic, well organized, vegan friendly Mexican cookbook. The basics and well loved recipes are represented, and the instructions are easy to understand and follow. They are arranged in chapters, thematically: starters, dinners & entrees, masa based meals, tacos tortas & tostadas, desserts & drinks, and condiments & salsas.

Ingredients will mostly be available at any large/well stocked international market/grocery store in North America. Recipes include an introduction, background info, and yields. Ingredients are provided in a bullet list, followed by step by step preparation instructions. Measurements are given in imperial (American) units with metric in parentheses (yay)!. Nutritional info is not provided.

About 20% of the recipes include color photographs. The plated foods are professionally styled and serving suggestions are appetizing and appropriate. The author/publisher have also included pantry lists for convenience as well as a cross-referenced index.

Four stars. Simple, but effective. It would be a nice choice for public or school library acquisition (it's a set volume, so it's worth acquiring all the volumes which are graphically similar with different themed cuisines), as well as for home use.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes

This book was well written and has beautiful pictures. Seems like a good book to inspire someone to try plant-based foods. I didn’t feel that this was that creative or innovative though for the genre. Nice cookbook though.

This is a very accessible vegan cookbook with a nice variety of recipes that cover the familiar and a few less familiar Mexican dishes.

The starters section provides a few yummy classic recipes such as tortilla soup (sopa de tortilla), vegetable soup (sopa de verdura), and black bean salad (ensalada de frijol negra), but also I was pleased to see a recipe for chayote cream soup (crema de chayote) and squash blossom tempura, which added a fun starters that were not quite as well known. The entree section contained the usual beany options that may already be a part of many vegan cooks' repertoires, but also some new and interesting takes on cabbage and poblano flautas and a great looking 10-ingredient mole with plantain. I also loved the many tofu dishes, especially in the tacos section.

Of the dishes that I tried, the cauliflower chorizo tasted quite good as did the seared oyster mushrooms. I also appreciated the very clear instructions for working with masa and making tortillas. The author adds a few deep dives that are quite helpful to new cooks, such as how to work with tofu in the vegan kitchen and how to get that burst of umami into your vegan dishes.

Some ingredients might be slightly challenging to source--such as vegan queso fresco, plant-based cheeses, and non-dairy butter--although these days one can order online if local markets do not carry these items.. I noticed that the author usually recommends oat milk in recipes that call for non-dairy milk, when I would assume that any non-dairy milk would would work fine. I substituted almond milk and it worked great in the recipes I tried.

All in all, i walked away from the book feeling that it was a thoughtful, well-designed, solid cookbook geared to beginner cooks. I would definitely give this as a gift to my vegan kids (who are young adults and comfortable in the kitchen) or to others in the earlier stages of their plant-based journeys.

My thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the ARC.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for letting me review this book. I’m trying to eat more plant based and Mexican is one of my favorite cuisines. So this was right up my alley. The pictures with each recipe was nice as well. I can’t wait to try several of these dishes.

This is one in a series of three so far (Southern, Indian, Mexican) and had some interesting Mexican recipe translations. The presentation is meh - hardly inspiring and none of the photographs made me want to run to the kitchen to try the recipe. Especially odd to me is how few recipes relied on beans at all - a staple of the Mexican diet. But the recipes did feel authentic, if surprisingly uninteresting.

The book breaks down as follows: Introduction, Keep your kitchen stacked, Starters, Dinner and Entrees, Masa Based meals, Tacos/tortas/tostadas, Desserts and drinks, Condiments and salsas, resources. The introduction tells you a bit about the author and then provides a list of ingredients you want to keep handy for that type of cooking. Recipes include: shell pasta soup, cabbage and poblano flautas, garbanzo ceviche tostadas, Mexican wedding cookies, crepes and caramel sauce, smoky salsa, refried beans, and many more.

Most, but not all, recipes include a photo. Each recipe breaks down as: title, description, serving size, italicized and bold ingredients, then clunky unnumbered paragraph steps. Tips are given on some recipes as well. There is no nutrition information, storage information, or substitution suggestions for allergies. There are tips for Mexican food cooking interspersed with the recipes.

The presentation is simple and not very inspiring. The photographs as well don't necessarily show the recipes off to advantage and often feel done by an Iphone in indifferent lighting. Admittedly, it created a lot of 'meh' rather than excitement for what was inside which was unfortunate.

Those with health concerns or weight issues would probably want to be careful here - there's a reason no nutrition information is given since you'll get a lot of unhealthy simple carbs and heavy fats. So while the recipes should taste good, the point here is vegan rather than vegan healthy. While reading through, I kept hoping for healthier options rather than what often felt like vegan Mexican comfort food. Reviewed from an advance reader copy provided by the publisher.

There are a few treasures of recipes in here but most are pretty basic. The recipes lean into comfort food and is beginner friendly!