The Art of Preparing Tamales and Ceviche

In the kitchen, preparation is key to creating a delicious meal. For our tamale dish, we start by trimming and cleaning the corn husk. The tamale's hull is then tenderized to make it pliable for filling. This process involves gently tapping the tamale to loosen its fibers and making it more receptive to the mole sauce that will soon be applied.

The next step is to prepare the marinade, a crucial component of the tamale-making process. A mixture of vegetable Sofrito, soy sauce, dry red chiles, olive oil, and lemon juice is created to tenderize the tamale further. This marinade is then applied to the tamale, allowing it to soak up the flavors and become more palatable.

The tamales are placed in a vacuum-sealed bag to keep them fresh and ready for assembly. With the main ingredient prepared, we can now focus on creating our ceviche dish. For this recipe, we need to crack open some oysters, clams, and scallops. The scallops, in particular, are a key component of the dish.

Before serving, we prepare the seafood by removing all but the reproductive system from the sea urchin. These parts will be used to create a ceviche with Baja bay scallops. Pea sprouts and avocado cucumber puree are added to enhance the flavors and textures of the dish. The combination of ingredients creates a delicious and refreshing ceviche that pairs perfectly with the tamale.

In the hot kitchen, the pace is fast-moving and frenetic. Orders are coming in left and right, and our team is working tirelessly to keep up. With four people on the hotline at any given time, it's clear that we're a well-oiled machine. The orders come in rapidly, but thanks to our efficient workflow, they're all being fulfilled quickly and with precision.

We have two main stations in the hot kitchen: one for grilling and another for plating. Our orders are coming in thick and fast, and we need to make sure that everything is cooked to perfection. The branzinos on the grill are cooking beautifully, and our pulas – a dish of steamed octopus with chorizo and chili peppers – are also a hit.

As the service progresses, it's clear that our team is working seamlessly together. We're all communicating effectively, and orders are being fulfilled quickly. The color of the ticket on the screen indicates how long an order has been waiting, and with everything under control, we can finally take a deep breath and relax.

The impact of the Michelin star cannot be overstated. It's brought in new customers and increased our reputation as a top-notch restaurant. While it's added to our workload, our team is up for the challenge. We're motivated and happy to continue serving more and more customers. The afternoon service is proving to be just as busy as the lunch service, with orders pouring in constantly.

In the hot kitchen, we have one final task to complete: scaling and gutting fish, filleting more fish, and steaming crabs. With so many dishes to prepare, it's clear that our team is working at peak efficiency. We're ready to take on whatever the day throws our way and ensure that every customer leaves with a memorable dining experience.

With the orders fulfilled and the kitchen spotless, we can finally take a moment to catch our breath. It's been a busy afternoon, but thanks to our efficient workflow and skilled team, everything has come together perfectly. As we close in on dinner service, we know that we're ready for whatever comes next – prepared, motivated, and committed to delivering an exceptional dining experience to every customer who walks through the door.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhbos is a Mexican seafood stand we're located in a food court called maralo La Paloma this is definitely the cheapest Michelin star meal you can get in Los Angeles you can get a $17 lunch special that is a svich MTO and two baja fish tacos or you could spend $100 on sea urchins and aach Chiles we'll serve anywhere from 600 to 1,300 people in a day being a chef and owner of a restaurant is demanding but I'm still cooking every day this is something that I absolutely love cooking is why I do what I do my name is Gilberto satina I'm the chef and owner of hbos we're about to get started with our day so so we're in the Exposition Park neighborhood of Los Angeles kind of the border between downtown and South La this building is called maral La Paloma and it's home to both my restaurants Chichen which we've had for 23 years mom and dad and I started it and our 7 and 1/2-year-old hos so it's about 7:45 a.m. our prep team are actually here since 6 they're working on veg prep and just all the general prep of the day first things I do when I step into the kitchen I like to check our drer our fish is in different stages of Readiness to be served we come in and we see what's ready to go so we can start mapping out the menu for the day we store our fish in a dry ager a fridge that controls temperature and humidity quite precisely what we're looking for is to give the enzymes time to break down the proteins into amino acids and this creates more of an Umami mouth feel uh a better eating experience when you bite into the fish when you store fish on Ice the fish stays really cold in reality all that moisture is what bacteria loves so the idea is to hang the fish so any moisture that's left on it is dripping down when we're checking the fish what we're looking for is just enough moisture lost and the fish should feel really firm and plump and we know that this fish is ready to cut we're looking for dryness we're looking for the sensation how tacky or smooth the skin feels we're also looking at the eyes of the fish we want to make sure that the eyes have remained nice and clear like this as the moisture content drops the relative fattiness goes up if we put this fish to the grill right now that skin will just blister and get super super crispy we'll be cutting into this Sky 11 days dry aged so it's 8:15 our cichos are here and they're going to start pulling down fish right now cutting fish for ceviche for the hot kitchen for grilling and I'll join them 120 lb tuna this guy local San Clemente Island beautiful fish so we're going to get this uh tuna ready for blue fin tuna sa each we go through about three of these in a week we've already cut into this Sky we use this part yesterday this top loin bottom here the belly loin is going to be a little bit fattier this is a medium siiz tuna so it's medium also on the scale of fattiness which is perfect when they're too fatty and you mix it with the lime juice it does this weird thing where the fat kind of congeal so these medium fatty Tunas are ideal for us all right so this is what we're going to work with uh for our lunch service today tail portion off here cut these rib bones off as a business owner it makes a lot more sense to buy this already processed it's not cheaper to do this it it is cheaper to buy the fish already processed and ready to go but you do lose something we want to be in touch with the food that we're preparing and we want to be executing the craft of preparing this fish and you know take pride in what we're serving these are all the parts that we got out of the belly loin of the of the tuna and we're going to cut some of it down to have it ready for ceviche you always want to make sure that we're cutting the fish at a medium to large dice when you're working with fish like this it's not just the flavor of it but we want to get that nice Square pieces of fish that you can really kind of sink your teeth into all right so let's pack this up tuna is cut all the rest of the fish is working our deliveries are starting to come in and we're going to go receive them and check them in the walk-in it's 9:30 our first fish delivery of the day came in you know Chef owner of hul I do help the team make sure that everything is a top quality be what we actually ordered cuz you'd be surprised a lot of times they'll do a little switcheroos on us these are our local abalon uh from Santa Barbara we're looking for abalon attached to each other that means that they are alive and very fresh and then we're looking when we run our finger down it that it has a nice response and that it moves so we want these abalon to be alive until the moment that we shuck them very happy with this healthy Abalone strong Abalone beautiful here we have our Lu and tuna that came in yesterday Urchins in the house this is uh one of two deliveries that we get every week of sea urchins from sea Stephanie fish from Santa Barbara some main lobster beautiful main lobsters and these are going to go into our tank with not just Mexican food but ethnic food this is like Unwritten price cage should not be too expensive and um what we decided to do here at hos is to work with the absolute best ingredients that we can find regardless of what the price is and despite the setting that we're in a lot of fish coming in a lot of prep to do we should be servicing uh about 6 or 700 guests today so there's a lot of work to do right now it's 10:00 a.m. we're here in the hot kitchen we're getting all of our prep done cutting some vegetables getting our banana leaves ready for different things thing setting up the line I'm going to set up the grill so we're really ready for customers when they come in at 11:30 so this is a wood burning Grill we use a combination of msk and Oak we have it with a Santa Maria style setup with this big wheel here that we can raise and lower the grates for us it's really important because we're cooking something that's really delicate specifically fish and lobster so we want to be able to control the temperature and um because when you're cooking with fire there are no kn that you can manipulate we control the temperature by raising and lowering the grill surface the bed of coals is actually built on top of construction beams we've uh built these doors onto them so as the fire starts going it starts heating up the uh the steel and this becomes like a little oven that's going to take uh probably about 15 20 minutes to really get going uh in the meantime um we're going to go ahead and jump on some other things we cut some octopus so this is our Mayan octopus this one is incredibly soft and and tender it almost has like a cooked ham consistency to it we poach them in liquid and then we let them cool in the poaching liquid so right now we're cutting the smaller tentacles and pieces of tentacle for ceviches and then the larger tentacles and better looking pieces have been separated for for our Taco de ptin and those cicles are to be fried up to be served on the octopus Taco so this recipe was one of my grandmother's Specialties and it became one of my dad's recipes so when we opened up hos I knew this was something that had to be on the menu we modified it a little bit to kind of suit our needs it can be a little intimidating octopus in a pitch black sopito so I thought if we offer it as a taco and make it as approachable as possible um more people will try it and that's what happened it actually became our top selling taco and we use deli cups as a unit of measure it's a court right we just call them delies I asked Miguel who brought the octopus like how many delies of octopus do you need today for for lunch right now and he's like oh whatever comes out of all that octopus is done so we do our 8 course tasting menu Thursdays and Fridays and we have h two seatings at 6:00 and 8:00 and it's really a time and a place for us to just have fun and really really connect with the diners it's kind of our R&D time and space a lot of new recipes on our regular menu start off as tasting menu experiments so the Abalone it's like one big muscle first thing is that we got to shuck these we're going to separate the Abalone abductor muscle from the shell just with a spoon like that and then we're going to pull the Abalone out to get all of the intestines and all the insides out in one movement and then here is our abalone shell it's going to be an abalone tamali this shell is going to be filled up with our Yucatan style Masa colada and then steamed together the shell and the Masa wrapped in banana leaves so the abalon have a liver this is it and it's like this conically shaped organ here it's green and when you cook this up it it is extremely rich filled with lipids and fat and Umami so we want to remove this without d in it we just pinch kind of the membrane that holds it together and we pull it off like this so there we have one Abalone liver it's going to be the basis for an abalone liver mle that's going to be used to Top This tamale this frill here is going to be used for the stock in uh making aalon mole so the next step after trimming it and cleaning it is tenderizing it so right now the avalone is super tight because we just shucked it out of its shell and gave it a haircut give it a few Taps and then we're going to put it off to the side to rest again if we keep keep hitting this when in tenderizing it's so tight it will eventually break so we have to do it kind of in stages uh do it a little bit of time and then let it relax and then go again and this is a marinade that we make with a vegetable Sofrito and soy sauce dry red chiles olive oil and lemon juice all right so we're going to take this to the vacuum sealer these are going to be ready for assembling our tamali tomorrow so it's 5 minutes till 11: we're getting ready to break for family meal we all going to sit down and have a quick lunch before we open up at 11:30 for service it's 11:30 we just opening I'm taking my position here at the cevich bar we got our station all ready to go we're going to be cracking SE doing oysters clams CES and AAS at this station while the team takes care of cich over there and the hot kitchen is doing tacos and our wood Gill Entre there's two types of service here at hos you either stand in line and order at the register get a number and then service comes to the table the other one is you sit here at the savich bar we'll take your order at the bar and you can even order with the cichos so this is the Santa Barbara red seon that we just received we want to use this as quickly as we can these are beautiful right now they're alive and moving and thriving we're getting rid of everything except the reproductive system which is what we eat on a sea urchin we know as oi and they're actually the gonads of the urchin and we're going to make a quick little Ceviche with Baja bay scallops and then that's it scallop Ceviche goes inside the urchin shell this is a little uh pea Sprout that we grow here in the resta restaurant and a little bit of our avocado cucumber puree we've been working at the cevich bar for a minute things are calming down here I think the rest of the team have it under control I'm going to jump over into the hot kitchen and see what they need over there it's around 1:00 we've got four people on the hotline right now one person doing tortillas and about four people on prep just kind of replenishing what we need and doing preparation for dinner service so that's out we need two to go one two we at the grill we' got some branzinos that are cooking we've got our order of pulas which is the octopus some Kachi collars also really and fet so a lot of orders in the works so these are all the orders as they're coming in for the Hot Kitchen I'm seeing both tacos and orders for the grill so we can make sure they're coming out at the same time we don't really need to talk a lot in the kitchen everybody keeping an eye on what everybody else is doing and we're synchronizing uh to make sure that the orders come out at the same time the color of the tab on the screen is just an indication of how long the order's been in so if an order gets to Red it means it's urgent this is a pretty calm service it's fastpac but all of our tickets are black we got it we got it under control here we're going to be plating one of the lighter plates lower price points very popular for our lunch it's our Fete Al Caron some P Deo and avocado cilantro poblano rice some black beans and a little fillet of Branzino our average ticket for lunch is $24 the Michelin star had a pretty big impact to be honest with you it's only been getting busier and busier every week I don't know where this is going to land but you know we are uh prepared and very motivated very happy to uh continue serving more and more customers so it's around 2:00 the Hot Kitchen has been doing well I think they have it all under control in the afternoon we still have to get more fish scaled and gutted we have to fillet more fish steam crabs I think we're going to get another round of octopus going really really busy afternoon we got to get a lot of that stuff done before the crowds come in again for dinner so I'm out of here I got to get to workhbos is a Mexican seafood stand we're located in a food court called maralo La Paloma this is definitely the cheapest Michelin star meal you can get in Los Angeles you can get a $17 lunch special that is a svich MTO and two baja fish tacos or you could spend $100 on sea urchins and aach Chiles we'll serve anywhere from 600 to 1,300 people in a day being a chef and owner of a restaurant is demanding but I'm still cooking every day this is something that I absolutely love cooking is why I do what I do my name is Gilberto satina I'm the chef and owner of hbos we're about to get started with our day so so we're in the Exposition Park neighborhood of Los Angeles kind of the border between downtown and South La this building is called maral La Paloma and it's home to both my restaurants Chichen which we've had for 23 years mom and dad and I started it and our 7 and 1/2-year-old hos so it's about 7:45 a.m. our prep team are actually here since 6 they're working on veg prep and just all the general prep of the day first things I do when I step into the kitchen I like to check our drer our fish is in different stages of Readiness to be served we come in and we see what's ready to go so we can start mapping out the menu for the day we store our fish in a dry ager a fridge that controls temperature and humidity quite precisely what we're looking for is to give the enzymes time to break down the proteins into amino acids and this creates more of an Umami mouth feel uh a better eating experience when you bite into the fish when you store fish on Ice the fish stays really cold in reality all that moisture is what bacteria loves so the idea is to hang the fish so any moisture that's left on it is dripping down when we're checking the fish what we're looking for is just enough moisture lost and the fish should feel really firm and plump and we know that this fish is ready to cut we're looking for dryness we're looking for the sensation how tacky or smooth the skin feels we're also looking at the eyes of the fish we want to make sure that the eyes have remained nice and clear like this as the moisture content drops the relative fattiness goes up if we put this fish to the grill right now that skin will just blister and get super super crispy we'll be cutting into this Sky 11 days dry aged so it's 8:15 our cichos are here and they're going to start pulling down fish right now cutting fish for ceviche for the hot kitchen for grilling and I'll join them 120 lb tuna this guy local San Clemente Island beautiful fish so we're going to get this uh tuna ready for blue fin tuna sa each we go through about three of these in a week we've already cut into this Sky we use this part yesterday this top loin bottom here the belly loin is going to be a little bit fattier this is a medium siiz tuna so it's medium also on the scale of fattiness which is perfect when they're too fatty and you mix it with the lime juice it does this weird thing where the fat kind of congeal so these medium fatty Tunas are ideal for us all right so this is what we're going to work with uh for our lunch service today tail portion off here cut these rib bones off as a business owner it makes a lot more sense to buy this already processed it's not cheaper to do this it it is cheaper to buy the fish already processed and ready to go but you do lose something we want to be in touch with the food that we're preparing and we want to be executing the craft of preparing this fish and you know take pride in what we're serving these are all the parts that we got out of the belly loin of the of the tuna and we're going to cut some of it down to have it ready for ceviche you always want to make sure that we're cutting the fish at a medium to large dice when you're working with fish like this it's not just the flavor of it but we want to get that nice Square pieces of fish that you can really kind of sink your teeth into all right so let's pack this up tuna is cut all the rest of the fish is working our deliveries are starting to come in and we're going to go receive them and check them in the walk-in it's 9:30 our first fish delivery of the day came in you know Chef owner of hul I do help the team make sure that everything is a top quality be what we actually ordered cuz you'd be surprised a lot of times they'll do a little switcheroos on us these are our local abalon uh from Santa Barbara we're looking for abalon attached to each other that means that they are alive and very fresh and then we're looking when we run our finger down it that it has a nice response and that it moves so we want these abalon to be alive until the moment that we shuck them very happy with this healthy Abalone strong Abalone beautiful here we have our Lu and tuna that came in yesterday Urchins in the house this is uh one of two deliveries that we get every week of sea urchins from sea Stephanie fish from Santa Barbara some main lobster beautiful main lobsters and these are going to go into our tank with not just Mexican food but ethnic food this is like Unwritten price cage should not be too expensive and um what we decided to do here at hos is to work with the absolute best ingredients that we can find regardless of what the price is and despite the setting that we're in a lot of fish coming in a lot of prep to do we should be servicing uh about 6 or 700 guests today so there's a lot of work to do right now it's 10:00 a.m. we're here in the hot kitchen we're getting all of our prep done cutting some vegetables getting our banana leaves ready for different things thing setting up the line I'm going to set up the grill so we're really ready for customers when they come in at 11:30 so this is a wood burning Grill we use a combination of msk and Oak we have it with a Santa Maria style setup with this big wheel here that we can raise and lower the grates for us it's really important because we're cooking something that's really delicate specifically fish and lobster so we want to be able to control the temperature and um because when you're cooking with fire there are no kn that you can manipulate we control the temperature by raising and lowering the grill surface the bed of coals is actually built on top of construction beams we've uh built these doors onto them so as the fire starts going it starts heating up the uh the steel and this becomes like a little oven that's going to take uh probably about 15 20 minutes to really get going uh in the meantime um we're going to go ahead and jump on some other things we cut some octopus so this is our Mayan octopus this one is incredibly soft and and tender it almost has like a cooked ham consistency to it we poach them in liquid and then we let them cool in the poaching liquid so right now we're cutting the smaller tentacles and pieces of tentacle for ceviches and then the larger tentacles and better looking pieces have been separated for for our Taco de ptin and those cicles are to be fried up to be served on the octopus Taco so this recipe was one of my grandmother's Specialties and it became one of my dad's recipes so when we opened up hos I knew this was something that had to be on the menu we modified it a little bit to kind of suit our needs it can be a little intimidating octopus in a pitch black sopito so I thought if we offer it as a taco and make it as approachable as possible um more people will try it and that's what happened it actually became our top selling taco and we use deli cups as a unit of measure it's a court right we just call them delies I asked Miguel who brought the octopus like how many delies of octopus do you need today for for lunch right now and he's like oh whatever comes out of all that octopus is done so we do our 8 course tasting menu Thursdays and Fridays and we have h two seatings at 6:00 and 8:00 and it's really a time and a place for us to just have fun and really really connect with the diners it's kind of our R&D time and space a lot of new recipes on our regular menu start off as tasting menu experiments so the Abalone it's like one big muscle first thing is that we got to shuck these we're going to separate the Abalone abductor muscle from the shell just with a spoon like that and then we're going to pull the Abalone out to get all of the intestines and all the insides out in one movement and then here is our abalone shell it's going to be an abalone tamali this shell is going to be filled up with our Yucatan style Masa colada and then steamed together the shell and the Masa wrapped in banana leaves so the abalon have a liver this is it and it's like this conically shaped organ here it's green and when you cook this up it it is extremely rich filled with lipids and fat and Umami so we want to remove this without d in it we just pinch kind of the membrane that holds it together and we pull it off like this so there we have one Abalone liver it's going to be the basis for an abalone liver mle that's going to be used to Top This tamale this frill here is going to be used for the stock in uh making aalon mole so the next step after trimming it and cleaning it is tenderizing it so right now the avalone is super tight because we just shucked it out of its shell and gave it a haircut give it a few Taps and then we're going to put it off to the side to rest again if we keep keep hitting this when in tenderizing it's so tight it will eventually break so we have to do it kind of in stages uh do it a little bit of time and then let it relax and then go again and this is a marinade that we make with a vegetable Sofrito and soy sauce dry red chiles olive oil and lemon juice all right so we're going to take this to the vacuum sealer these are going to be ready for assembling our tamali tomorrow so it's 5 minutes till 11: we're getting ready to break for family meal we all going to sit down and have a quick lunch before we open up at 11:30 for service it's 11:30 we just opening I'm taking my position here at the cevich bar we got our station all ready to go we're going to be cracking SE doing oysters clams CES and AAS at this station while the team takes care of cich over there and the hot kitchen is doing tacos and our wood Gill Entre there's two types of service here at hos you either stand in line and order at the register get a number and then service comes to the table the other one is you sit here at the savich bar we'll take your order at the bar and you can even order with the cichos so this is the Santa Barbara red seon that we just received we want to use this as quickly as we can these are beautiful right now they're alive and moving and thriving we're getting rid of everything except the reproductive system which is what we eat on a sea urchin we know as oi and they're actually the gonads of the urchin and we're going to make a quick little Ceviche with Baja bay scallops and then that's it scallop Ceviche goes inside the urchin shell this is a little uh pea Sprout that we grow here in the resta restaurant and a little bit of our avocado cucumber puree we've been working at the cevich bar for a minute things are calming down here I think the rest of the team have it under control I'm going to jump over into the hot kitchen and see what they need over there it's around 1:00 we've got four people on the hotline right now one person doing tortillas and about four people on prep just kind of replenishing what we need and doing preparation for dinner service so that's out we need two to go one two we at the grill we' got some branzinos that are cooking we've got our order of pulas which is the octopus some Kachi collars also really and fet so a lot of orders in the works so these are all the orders as they're coming in for the Hot Kitchen I'm seeing both tacos and orders for the grill so we can make sure they're coming out at the same time we don't really need to talk a lot in the kitchen everybody keeping an eye on what everybody else is doing and we're synchronizing uh to make sure that the orders come out at the same time the color of the tab on the screen is just an indication of how long the order's been in so if an order gets to Red it means it's urgent this is a pretty calm service it's fastpac but all of our tickets are black we got it we got it under control here we're going to be plating one of the lighter plates lower price points very popular for our lunch it's our Fete Al Caron some P Deo and avocado cilantro poblano rice some black beans and a little fillet of Branzino our average ticket for lunch is $24 the Michelin star had a pretty big impact to be honest with you it's only been getting busier and busier every week I don't know where this is going to land but you know we are uh prepared and very motivated very happy to uh continue serving more and more customers so it's around 2:00 the Hot Kitchen has been doing well I think they have it all under control in the afternoon we still have to get more fish scaled and gutted we have to fillet more fish steam crabs I think we're going to get another round of octopus going really really busy afternoon we got to get a lot of that stuff done before the crowds come in again for dinner so I'm out of here I got to get to work\n"