We caught up with award-winning chef and public television personality Rick Bayless via telephone at his restaurants in Chicago for our inaugural Be more Tuned In podcast. The mp3 podcast can be downloaded here and can be enjoyed on your personal computer or loaded onto your personal mp3 player for on-the-go listening.
Bayless is an interesting guy. An Oklahoma native, he has gone on to become one of the country's premiere Mexican chefs. Through his years of culinary exploration, Bayless has brought public television viewers along for many of his journeys. Stretching all the way back to the late 1970s, Bayless hosted a series simply called Cooking Mexican. After that program, he and his wife, Deann Groen Bayless, truly devoted their lives to Mexican flavors as they worked in that country in preparation of their 1987 book, Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking from the Heart of Mexico, a tome that has been lauded as one of the best collections of Mexican cuisine ever written. Around that same time, they settled into a new home in Chicago and opened the Frontera Grill. The fine dining Topolobampo would follow, along with a line of specialty foods.
Bayless also created a new television program, Mexico: One Plate at a Time With Rick Bayless. In the show, Bayless takes viewers into Mexico's wide ranging regions to look for traditional foods and then returns to his own kitchen to teach viewers how to bring the flavors of Mexico into their own homes. His most recent cookbook, Mexico Everyday, teaches readers that home cooking is an important part of healthy living and doesn't have to be a chore. His fifth season of Mexico: One Plate at a Time With Rick Bayless comes to WPT at 12:30 p.m. Saturdays.
