About José

I am José Villalobos, born in Valparaíso, Chile, where the pebre on the table was never the same twice and nobody wrote any of it down. My grandmother cooked by smell and correction, and everything I have eaten since gets measured against that. I worked in restaurants through college in San Francisco, then spent 20+ years in marketing, specializing in organic content, topical authority, and geo/AEO strategy. Seasoning is the thread that runs through all of it. I have cooked and eaten my way across South America and Mexico, and what keeps pulling me back is how one preparation changes shape as it crosses a border: hogao and sofrito are one idea with different aromatics, not two subjects that happen to look alike. No culinary degree. A grandmother as a benchmark, and twenty years of paying attention.

Sazon y Tumbao isn't a recipe diary. It's an attempt to answer the questions I kept asking in markets from Santiago to Oaxaca: what is this, where does it come from, how is it made, and how do cooks there actually use it? I research obsessively, I cook the things I write about, and I tell you what I genuinely think, including when the famous jar isn't worth the money.

The site is organised the way the cooking works, not the way a map does. Seasonings sit in three families: the base cooked in fat at the start, the finish added raw at the table, and the dry blend kept on the shelf. Underneath all three sit the single ingredients, the ajies and seeds and barks each bought and judged on their own.

Country is an attribute here, never the filing system. Colombian hogao and Venezuelan sofrito are one preparation with different aromatics, not two subjects that happen to resemble each other, and filing them apart would tell you nothing about why they are alike.

If something here helps you buy better or cook braver, that's the whole point. Questions, or a correction from your grandmother's kitchen? I'd love to hear it.