Chef Paola Garduño On The Beauty Of Slowing Down

Delicious, smoky scents filled the small conference room where Mexican chef Paola Garduño was cooking a large turkey leg over an open flame — with her bare hand.

As the head chef at popular Mexico City restaurants Café O, O2, and O Pan, Garduño demonstrated her culinary techniques for fans, foodies, and members of the media who had gathered to see her show off at the Cancún-Riviera Maya Wine & Food Festival. As she grilled, trying to keep the smoke rising from the stovetop to a minimum, Garduño spoke about the traditions and histories of cuisine in her country.

"We all know how tamales are made," she said of the popular Mexican dish. "But we are trying to remember how we cooked in Mexico, in our homes, in pre-Hispanic times." To highlight some of the native techniques of Mexico that existed before the Spanish (and then America) influenced what we now know as Mexican food, Garduño prepared dishes like the turkey leg, as well as whole fish cooked with vegetables in spices in banana leaves, which she roasted in a kind of double-sided skillet made of stone and clay.

She also added ingredients to a strange-looking contraption near the demonstration cooktop, explaining it was an ancient-style oven, which could be heated with coal, that she had brought with her. Garduño and a friend built it specifically for the demonstration.

When it comes to cooking, "we need to slow down," she told the audience. "We have limited our time too much."

She showed how to heat the heavy stone skillets of her ancestors to roast cook a fish or poultry dish. "You do not need so many tools to cook," said Garduño, adding, "You can find local ingredients, and prepare them in a traditional way. Even if it takes longer ... we have lost so much of the intimacy with food when we cook."

After her much-applauded demonstration, the chef stepped out onto the beachfront terrace of the Sandos Cancún Hotel to speak to The Daily Meal about her participation in Cancún Wine & Food.

"I love new things," she said of today's culinary trends. "But I think we don't have to forget what we were and how we started. There is beauty in simplicity. It is beautiful to be simple sometimes."

Garduño studied culinary arts and pastry at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris from 1985 to 1987, and later went on to study at both the Culinary Institute of America in Mexico and Culinary Institute of America in New York. Now, she is focused and passionate about reintroducing the art of ancient Mexican cooking to both the people of Mexico and abroad.

"As chefs, we tend to want to do things which are different," Garduno admitted. "But sometimes, we have to go back to what is simple and lovely. We have forgotten what that is."