‘There are no rules for salsa making’ says Rick Martinez

When your favorite meal is made up of beans and tortillas in any form, salsa is a no-brainer. And if you think of salsa as a delicious vegetable side, your love for the stuff can only get stronger. Tomato season is coming, which means a lot of salsas will be better than ever. Rick Martínez — who visited us a couple years ago to discuss his bestselling cookbook Mi Cocina: Recipes and Rapture from My Kitchen in Mexico — knows his way around a salsa. In fact, he loves salsa so much, he has devoted his latest collection of recipes, Salsa Daddy: A Cookbook, to the mélange of chilies, tomatoes, onions, and even kiwi. 

Evan Kleiman: We always love when we have you on, Rick. I know that you have a story, sort of your mad lens story about salsa, where you had one salsa that changed everything for you. What was that and where was it?

Rick Martínez: It was actually a really good friend of mine. He has a taqueria in Mexico City, and I had gone, and he makes these ridiculous tortas. They’re huge, and he puts pretty much everything on them. When he brought out this torta, he brought out basically a tower. Imagine a seafood tower but with salsa. He wanted me to try all the different salsas that he had, and one of them was not anything like I’d ever had before. 

It didn’t look like anything I’ve ever had before. It was sort of thick, chopped up, caramelized onions but with a healthy dose of caramelized serranos as well. And the flavor was, imagine the most unctuous and delicious caramelized French onions that you’re about to put into a soup, only with the heat of serrano, and it kind of blew my mind. Just these two ingredients plus salt and it completely changed the flavor and the profile of the torta. Then later, the taco had it as well. It just seemed so, so, so different, so unique. 

As I talked to him about it, he just had a very cavalier, kind of nonchalant attitude about it. Like, “Well, yeah, I love caramelized onions, so I put some serranos with it.” In the end, that was as much thought as he had given to that salsa. I love that idea. This sort of like, well, I like this, and therefore I’m going to make a salsa with it.

Rick Martinez credits a two ingredient caramelized onion salsa in Mexico City with blowing his mind and changing everything. Photo by Ren Fuller.

Speaking of breaking from the usual ingredients, talk to me about kiwi. How do you make a salsa with it?

I love kiwi and tomatillos as a combination. I actually really like fruit paired with tomatillos. To me, the flavor profile of a tomatillo, while very tart and acidic, it has tart, jammy, plum vibes. I like pairing it with plums as well. Anytime you pair a fruit with a tomatillo, it brings out the fruitiness and the sweetness in the tomatillo. So the kiwi was sort of a tropical pairing. 

I wanted to create a green pico de gallo, and I felt like the kiwi had enough sweetness to really balance out the tartness of the tomatillo. Then it also takes you in a very different direction. Whereas when you pair a tomatillo with a plum, you get more of a prickly pear kind of vibe. But with kiwi or green mango, papaya or pineapple, it takes you very much into a beach and seafood place, which I love as well.

Though tart and acidic, tomatillos have jammy, plummy vibes that work perfectly in a kiwi salsa. Photo by Alex Lau.

Given that you just mentioned seafood, would you pair that kind of sauce with something in particular? I hate to use the word rules, but do you feel that certain sauces pair best with certain other ingredients, or is everything just a mishmash of our own personal taste?

The way that I view it is very similar to wine pairings. I feel like 15, 20 years ago, there were seemingly very strict rules about red and white wines and what you could pair with them. I think those ideas are not not enforced anymore. I think people just drink the wine that they want to drink, and if it happens to taste good with what they’re eating, I think they’re fine with that. I think that that kind of mentality applies to salsas as well. 

Now that said, me, personally, I like pairing more tropical flavors with seafood because it reminds me of home. Here in Mazatlán, mangoes, pineapple, papaya, mangoes grow within a mile of my house. In fact, I have mango and pineapple plants on my patio. Oftentimes, when you’re at a taqueria or when you’re on the beach, they’re serving ceviches and tacos with those fruits in a spicy salsa or a pico de gallo or a salad. So it’s just another reminder of the sea. 

I like that, but I think there’s another salsa in the book, Salsa Tejana, that is really an homage to my father, who grew pecan trees and peach trees. Every summer, we harvested peaches together, and in the fall, we would harvest the pecans, and I wanted to make a salsa out of those two ingredients. Immediately after I made that salsa, I thought this would be incredible with pork carnitas. So I ran out and I got some carnitas. I came back and built this taco. And sure enough, I think pork loves peaches, but fruit generally, and the toasted pecans added an extra layer of umami and toasty, roasted nut flavor that paired so well with the pork.

Let’s dial back to some basic stuff. Let’s talk about tomato sauces for a minute. What varieties of tomatoes do you use for most of your salsa? 

Roma for me. This is a function of Mexico, and also where I live. Roma tomatoes are the most common tomatoes in Mexico. Fortunately for me, they are good year-round. 

That said, having lived in New York for 20 years, I had a two-month window of opportunity to use tomatoes, and so I used whatever had the most flavor. And I loved heirlooms. During August and September, I was just continually buying heirlooms and anytime I needed a tomato, that’s what I used. In the colder months, I would use Campari or grape tomatoes. If they had really good flavor out of the box, I would use them raw. If they were bordering on good flavor, I might cut them in half and roast them or saute them in a little olive oil to evaporate some of the moisture and concentrate the flavors and build up some of that umami. 

I might also, in wintertime, char a tomato that maybe was not so great to concentrate the flavor, but then also, adding an element of smoke. That bitterness, I think, does wonders for an out-of-season tomato. 

But I think the most important thing for me when talking to someone about tomatoes in the United States is to use the best that you can find. Sometimes that’s a can, and that’s totally fine. I would cook it at some point, in some way, either roast it or saute it or simmer it, just to cook off that can flavor. But you’re going to get a much better, more flavorful tomato salsa using a canned tomato or a fire roasted tomato, then you are a mealy, January grocery store tomato.

Can I ask you about onions? Why are we always using white onions? 

It’s the one that’s most common in Mexico. You can, again, use the onion that you have or that you like, but it also has a very, very clean flavor. The thing that I like about it versus either yellow or red onions is that the burn of the white onion is very quick. It hits you then it recedes whereas the yellow tends to linger. I think the flavor of a red is a little bit too aggressive for me. I like them pickled, or if I’m gonna use a raw red onion in a salsa or as a topping for a taco or a garnish, I actually let it soak in salted hot water for five minutes, to take that edge off. I just find them to be a little bit too aggressive and a lot of times, I’ll only taste the red onion and not whatever it is that I’m eating.

“Salsa Daddy” is a mélange of chilies, tomatoes, onions, and even kiwi. Photo courtesy of Clarkson Potter.

Let’s talk about fresh chilies versus dried. Are there rules for one versus the other? I know some traditional sauces, every recipe you see seems to be dried. And then other salsas, every recipe you see seems to be fresh. So what are some of the rules?

Again, no rules. If you were making a red salsa, whether that is a cooked salsa or a table salsa de mesa, which is more like a condiment or a dip, you would want to stick to things that are red in color. So if you’re making a salsa roja for chilaquiles or enchiladas, for example, you would probably be using guajillos. You could put a fresh chili in there but you’re gonna muddle up the color, and if the color is important to you, which I think it should be, I would much prefer to see a red cooked salsa on chilaquiles or enchiladas than something that’s more blackish brown. So you would want to use maybe chile de arbol, chiltepin, morita, chipotle, and adobo. All of those are going to contribute to the red color and give you a different type of heat. 

The pequin, chiltepin, and chile de arbol are much more intense. Chiltepin and pequin tend to be pretty quick. They’ll hit you and they’ll go away. Chili, the de arbol, is more of a lingering heat. Chipotle and Morita will give you that smoky heat, which is, I think, very nice as well. 

For the fresh chili, you can also use fresh chili. The de arbol, that’s red. You can use a Fresno. If you have other peppers, ghost peppers, maybe you have a habanero that you want to use that’s orange, or a dark, a deep orange, use that. But again, there are no rules. There are no rules in salsa making. It’s what you like and what you have and the effect that you’re going for.

I know I’m going to be making salsa after this interview, but I do live alone, so give me one idea for incorporating leftover salsa into a quick meal.

Funny enough, the thing that I probably do most often is chicken. I will literally just go to the market, get a chicken, cut it in half, brown it on both sides, and then dump two to three cups of salsa in the pot, cover it, and then simmer it for 45 minutes. And without exception, it has been incredibly delicious.

Also, the other thing that I’ve been doing is if I have random vegetables in the crisper, extra chilies, onion, herbs, scallion, potatoes, carrots, celery, I will chop those up and add it to the pot. It is the most easy and delicious braise. I have, literally, for the last week and a half, eaten three chickens made in this manner, but each one has been completely different because the salsas have been different and the stuff in the crisper drawer has been different.