Mezcla by Ixta Belfrage Review: Bold Fusion Cooking With a Few Catch-Points

Introduction

Over five days of cooking, 11 of the 100 recipes from Mezcla by Ixta Belfrage made it to the table: five mains and six sides, with zero dependencies, meaning no recipe required making a sauce, stock, or spice blend first to complete it. The average cost per serving came to around $8.24, and the average time to take a recipe from start to finish was about an hour and a half.

This review breaks the book down across accessibility, design, flavor, writing, and value, and ends with a final score of 7 out of 10. The short version: the beautiful presentation of some dishes writes checks their flavors cannot always cash, but fans of fusion cuisine will still find plenty worth cooking.

Accessibility: 8/10

The most uncommon tools the recipes asked for were a blender, a mandolin, and a blowtorch, and the blowtorch was completely optional. The most difficult skills involved julienning green onions and butterflying shrimp, both of which a quick search resolved in minutes. The ingredient list was trickier from a Los Angeles kitchen: Scotch bonnet, nduya sausage, and piri piri seasoning required some effort, though it is reasonable to expect most of these are easier to find in London than in LA.

Ixta and her team do a great job of providing alternatives, so many hard-to-find items can be replaced. The exception is nduya, for which there is not much of a genuine substitute. For accessibility, the book earns an 8.

Design: 6.5/10

Two main gripes hold the design back. First, the text is very small and sometimes hard to read, which makes fine details like a half teaspoon of fine salt easy to misjudge. Second, the recipe layout deprioritizes helpful side notes, often pushing them to the bottom of the page or even onto a second page. That is especially disappointing because the notes hide genuinely useful details, and if you are not the kind of reader who brings their cookbook to the counter and reads every line, you will miss tidbits like poblanos being the first-choice pepper.

The photos, as expected from anyone familiar with Ixta’s Instagram presence, are vibrant, punchy, and aesthetic. But those layout issues cost the book here, and design lands at 6.5.

Flavor: 7/10

The book is divided into two main sections: everyday and entertaining. By the end of the week, six everyday dishes and five entertaining dishes had been cooked. The everyday dishes were quick to get on the table, around 45 to 60 minutes each, but the flavors were underwhelming and the cleanup was more of a pain than any other multi-pan meal in recent memory. Things were baked hard in that oven more than once.

The entertaining dishes, by contrast, took two to three hours each but were genuinely hands-off, and the flavors were phenomenal. Pretty much every recipe worth recommending from this book comes from that section. One running discovery across both sections: the uglier the dish looked, the better it tasted. Flavor finishes at a solid 7. Nothing here was disappointing, exactly; some dishes were simply prettier than they were effective.

Writing: 7/10

The recipes read like a blend of Alison Roman and Yotam Ottolenghi sensibilities: built around trendy ingredients with a few curveballs here and there. The prose is kept short and sweet, mostly tying each recipe to a personal experience from the author.

There are some genuinely great tips and substitutions slipped into the book, but the typeface makes them easy to overlook if you are not reading closely. The introduction also explains that the author measures anything over three tablespoons in grams, and everything else in spoons. That mixed approach is frustrating, because a full switch to grams would have made the book easier to work from, and it produces measurements like a third of a teaspoon. The design of the book diminishes the writing, but it still earns a 7.

Value: 9/10

A cookbook is considered worth its cover price if it delivers two to three repeat-worthy dishes out of a test week. This one delivered six out of 11 recipes cooked, which is a strong hit rate. Value comes in at a 9.

Buying Advice

Mezcla makes the most sense for cooks interested in fusion cuisine, especially Brazilian, Italian, and Mexican flavors. If your priority is fast weeknight cooking, the everyday section may underwhelm on flavor and overdeliver on cleanup. If you enjoy longer, mostly hands-off weekend projects with standout results, the entertaining section is where this book earns its keep.

Conclusion

Mezcla lands at a final score of 7. The everyday dishes underdeliver and the small typeface buries some of the book’s best advice, but the entertaining section’s flavors are genuinely phenomenal, the accessibility is strong, and at $35 the value per successful recipe is hard to argue with. For the right cook, it is worth the price of admission.