Rick Martínez likes to cook without guardrails

The James Beard award-winning author on his second book, Salsa Daddy.

If you enjoyed this issue, head to the bottom to like or comment so others can find it. Thank you!

Rick Martínez is a James Beard award-winning chef, author, and TV host based in Mazatlán, Mexico. You might recognize him from the Bon Appétit culinary universe, and he’s also been featured in The New York Times and Food 52. His first cookbook, Mi Cocina won the James Beard Award for best international cookbook, and his second book, Salsa Daddy, a love letter to the brightest dish in any Mexican meal, comes out today!

Rick and I chatted about how living in Mexico has influenced his cooking style, why he chose salsas as the focus of his second book, and how experimenting leads to delicious ideas.

Brianna Plaza: Tell me how you got into cooking and food media.

Rick Martínez: My mother is really the reason why I cook. When I was little, she would pick me up after work, she’d cook and I’d help. It was just such a beautiful moment that we shared — she would tell me what she was doing, why she was doing it. She always taught me to cook for love.

My parents were very much like, “You need to get a degree that’s going to get you a good job,” but I really wanted to go to culinary school. I went to the University of Texas in Austin, but every summer I’d interview at the Culinary Institute of America, and my parents would convince me not to go. I ended up in advertising for 16 years, starting in Dallas and eventually New York. I worked at all the big agencies and I really loved my job.

But I was always thinking about food, what I wanted to cook, the parties I wanted to host, the menus. So I started taking classes and I just wanted to do that. In my last big advertising gig, I had the Unilever account and was working for Breyer’s Ice Cream to create this new line of flavors. One day an internal chefs was like, "Why are you doing advertising? You need to go to culinary school and get a job doing this. Your face lights up when we are talking about ice cream flavors.” That was the push I needed.

I went to a culinary school in New York and decided I wanted to work in food media. With my background in marketing and culinary degree, that was going to be my ticket in. I got a job at ABC Kitchen, which had just opened, and I learned how to work the line, which was invaluable. I did that for a few years and thought, "Okay. Now Food Network.” But there were very few jobs available, so I took an internship, and they eventually hired me on as freelance. I worked for about fours years as a freelancer, then went to Bon Appétit. I had learned to cook in a restaurant, and had learned food media at Food Network, so when I went to Bon Appétit, I learned how to actually write a recipe. I started to develop my own personal style of cooking.

That all brings me to here. When I started writing my first book, Mi Cocina, I was traveling all over Mexico and the pandemic started. It got really bad in New York and I didn't want to go back. So I thought, “I'm going to go hang out on a beach and write the recipes." I stopped in Mazatlán and got an Airbnb, and I was like, "I'll stay here until it passes and then I'll go back." And then I just never left.

Photographs from Salsa Daddy via Instagram | Alex Lau © 2025

Brianna Plaza: How has living in Mexico influenced your cooking style?

Rick Martínez: It's funny, because I think if you had asked me this six years ago, I don't think I could have imagined the impact that it's had. Beforehand, because I made Mexican food for TV and magazines, there was this idea that I had to pay homage to the dish, be respectful of the origins and where it came from, and then understanding what my audience is going to wan or the techniques that they would be willing to use.

Now, I've visited every state, I've been to probably over 500 cities in the country, and tasted most of the iconic dishes in each city and region. Because I've been living here with Mexican ingredients, I understand how flavors and textures are put together in a way that I didn't know before. There's something so second nature about cooking the food for me to the point now where I feel like I can almost Mexicanize any dish.

When you live here, you learn that here's a melody to most dishes. Whether it's a taco, tamale, or enchilada, there’s a balance. There's a soft texture. There's a crunchy texture. There's an acidic note. There's a bitter note. There's a sweet note and a salty note, and there's also differences in temperature. So you might have something really hot, like a taco filling, but then it's always got something cold on the top of it, like a salsa.

I think many American cooks try to create a perfectly balanced dish that doesn't need anything. Here what I've learned is you make the dish that you want to eat, knowing that everybody is going to customize it based on their taste. There's always going to be a bowl of limes, extra chilis, salsas, herbs, and onion. You can invite 10 people over for dinner, feed them all the same dish, and every single plate is going to be different.

I remember at Bon Appétit and they were always tweaking the dishes. It was like, "Well, do you really want to ask someone to make this mole and then ask them to buy an extra onion for a topping?” But that's just a part of this cuisine. It's just a bunch of little bowls, and it doesn't matter what it is, you're going to fix it up to fit your taste. And the beauty of that to me is that every bite is different.

Brianna Plaza: Your first book has a bit of a wider focus on different regions of Mexico. But this book is much more narrowly focused on salsa. Why did you decide to go that route?

Rick Martínez: Salsas are such a foundational part of the cuisine. Sometimes, I feel like the breadth of the salsa universe for most people is red, green, maybe charred, maybe salsa macha, guac, and then that's kind of it. I wanted to expand the canon beyond the American staples of Mexican cuisine. So the first three chapters are really about the method of preparation: chopped, blended, and smashed. Then we start to go into cooked salsas that can be used as a part of another dish.

At family gatherings, everybody brings a dish, and younger people typically defer to older people to make their signature thing. If grandma is making pozole, you’re not making pozole. It's a hierarchy, so if you're young, what are you left with? You make salsa. It's a relatively low-lift investment, and people are trying to outshine each other with these mind-blowing salsas.

There are no guardrails. Whatever you can dream to put in a bowl, do it. And so, with this book, that was something that I wanted to do. I wanted to explore the classics but at a certain point, I was just like, "I'm going to just experiment and see what works."

I'm from Texas. I love peaches and pecans. My father had peach trees and pecan trees. So I was like, "Okay. I'm going to make a peach and pecan salsa, and it's either going to be incredibly delicious or really, really horrible." I toasted the pecans, grilled the peaches. I put habanero and orange juice and lime juice in it, and it was insanely delicious. That salsa does not exist in Mexican canon, it was just something that I wanted to explore. The more I explored and pushed myself, the more I realized that people should be doing that as well.

One thing that I didn’t anticipate was that by the end of the week, I had literally 10 quarts of salsa in my refrigerator, and my neighbors were like, "No. You need to just leave us alone. Don't bring that over here." I was like, "I have to do something with this. I need to eat dinner, and I need to figure out how to make this work."

I made a meat loaf with salsa one day. I cooked eggs in salsa, like a shakshuka. I was using it as glazes, as marinades, as flavor agents. I was freezing them. I gathered this repertoire of weeknight meal prep, and I was like, “Salsa is the best thing to have at your disposal for an easy weeknight meal.” That, to me, became a big selling point for the book, and also just the way that I cook now.

Photographs from Salsa Daddy via Instagram | Alex Lau © 2025

Brianna Plaza: How do you do research, and how do you decide which direction you want to go?

Rick Martínez: I mean, honestly, it's really just eating. I mean, I couldn't even venture a guess how many taquerias I've been to.

I have a friend in Mexico City who has a taquería, and one of the recipes in the book is inspired by one of his salsas. It’s basically a caramelized onion and serrano salsa. It’s rich and unctuous and sweet and caramely, but super spicy. It’s just a few ingredients: salt, onion, serrano, and oil. The first time I had that was three years ago, and it just opened up my mind. "What is a salsa? What can a salsa be?" I don't know that I’ve found the answer.

I think to me, the organization of the book was really the most important part about deciding what recipes I wanted in it. I didn't think that doing it by ingredient would work, and also, to me, that was very limiting. I thought about it more from the perspective of the cook, so it gets harder as you progress through the chapters.

The first three chapters are super easy. If you have five minutes, put it in a blender. If you have 10 minutes, smash it. If you have 15 minutes, chop it. And then we get into the cooked part, which is going to take a little longer. You can definitely use them on chips or on tacos, but they're really meant as a sort of mother sauce. And then the fun ones, like the sweet salsas.

Once I had the structure down, I knew I could write 8-10 recipes for each chapter. There are special sections that were born because there were just random recipes and I wanted to have an opportunity to do a little bit of an interlude and more of a personal tale. They’re between each chapter to break them up with stories, recipes, and tips and tricks.

** A heads up! Some links in this post are affiliate links, meaning I’ll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you if you decide to purchase anything. Thanks so much for supporting this newsletter!