Warmer weather means cool drinks and fun snacks, and when it comes to snacks, salsa is one of our go-tos. It’s fresh and easy and delicious and a simple thing to put out for a party.
But have you really taken the time to think about salsa? Maybe you have a go-to store-bought option or have dabbled in making your own, but Rick Martinez, a James Beard award-winning chef, author and TV host has done a deep dive into this sometimes spicy (and pretty much always delicious) sauce in his new book, Salsa Daddy: Dip Your Way into Mexican Cooking.
With Cinco de Mayo on the horizon, it seemed like the perfect time to sit down with Martinez and do a deep dive into all things salsa. As we suspected, he had some genius tips, tricks and recipe ideas to share with us. After chatting with him, we’re excited for a summer of salsas. Our biggest challenge? Knowing which recipe to make first. Read on for his advice on making stellar salsas at home.
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Photo by Alex Lau. Reprinted with permission from Salsa Daddy: Dip Your Way into Mexican Cooking by Rick Martínez, copyright © 2025. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Rick Martinez’s 9 Tips for Salsa Success
Looking to take your salsa up a notch (or seven)? Martinez has some thought to help you get there.
1. Embrace the salsa spectrum
When Martinez was working on the cookbook, he was very aware that many cooks think of their salsa options as red or green, but really, it’s more about the salsa spectrum. There are so many ingredients—vegetables, fruits, nuts, herbs, oils, cheese—that can go into a salsa. Once you think outside that red or green box, your salsa world will open up. “I really wanted to give people freedom and creative license with these salsas to be daring, brave and bold,” he says. “So that was really the point of this book.”
Martinez has seen this salsa creativity in Mexico, where he currently lives. “One of the things that has struck me living in Mexico for the last five years is that people are so free to create,” he says. “They use what they have, use what they like, use what’s in season, use what they can afford in their salsas and it’s really interesting.”
“One of the things that I’ve noticed going to family parties is that there’s a hierarchy within Mexican families that if your grandmother is making tamales, you don’t make tamales. If your older aunts or your mom are making the rice or the beans, you don’t make those things, which then leaves salsa for the younger folks to make.
“I’ve seen little kids—like 8, 9, 10, 11 years old—making these amazing salsas. And it’s low lift. It’s a low investment. You don’t need to have crazy culinary skills. You just need to have a basic understanding of flavor, what tastes good, what you like and maybe a blender—that’s pretty much it.
“And the reward is that you get to stand out among all of these culinary giants. If you make a salsa that everybody in the family loves, that everybody craves, then people ask for it at the next family party. You know, that is a pretty significant accomplishment.”
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2. Taste the tomatoes
This might seem obvious, but not all tomatoes are delicious yearround. If you’re making a tomato-based salsa, remember that you have options.
“I recently was in L.A. and I made a pico de gallo with what looked to be really, really beautiful tomatoes, but they had not flavor,” says Martinez. “They were very showy and they were beautiful, but they had no substance. And so the only thing that I could taste was onion and cilantro. That’s why I encourage people to use different tomatoes—use what has the best flavor. So if it’s January, and the only thing that you have are grape tomatoes or Campari tomatoes, or even canned tomatoes, use those.”
Photo by Alex Lau. Reprinted with permission from Salsa Daddy: Dip Your Way into Mexican Cooking by Rick Martínez, copyright © 2025. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
3. Give it some time
You can eat salsa as soon as you make it, but Martinez has found that sometimes a little bit of time can transform a salsa into something extra special.
“I just love fermented salsas,” he says. “You can let any salsa—probably with the exception of anything with avocado or fruit in it—sit on the counter for a day or two (no more than than four days). It completely changes the salsa. I think you know day one salsas tend to be really aggressive, not only in their flavor, but in their heat. And a lot of the the ingredients are all kind of competing, but by day two and three, everything sort of mellowed. Everything is singing more harmoniously together. And then by day three and four, you start to get a little bit of tang. You start to get a little bit of funk that I personally enjoy and the umami builds as it sits.”
4. Check the crisper
You can absolutely got to the supermarket and pick up everything you need for a specific salsa, but salsa is also a great way to use up all those produce bits and bobs that you have in your crisper drawer—and a fun way to tap into your culinary creativity.
“What I’ve been doing recently is just using whatever is left in the crisper drawer,” says Martinez. “At the end of the week, I just turn into a salsa, and it’s an easy way to use up things, and also just, it’s just kind of fun because the flavor profiles are always different depending on what I’ve been cooking.
“It can really be anything—like, pineapple or papaya or strawberries. I think strawberries and chili árbol is a really good combination, with lime and a little bit of garlic. Add a little it of olive oil and it makes a really good salad dressing.
“This is also how the cucumber salsa in the book was born. I bought the cucumber thinking I was going to use it for something, and I didn’t. And I saw it in the crisper drawer, and I was like, I need to use this so I decided to see if I could make a salsa with a cucumer base. It was a very interesting flavor profile, very different than I think probably most Americans are used to, and even, probably most Mexicans. It was refreshing in the same way that spa water is refreshing—the coolness of the cucumber really tamed the heat of the chilies.”
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5. Watch your speed
Faster isn’t always better, and that idea apparently applies to salsa-making, which is something Martinez found out the hard way.
“If you’re using fruit or tomatillos or tomatoes, you never want to blend above medium or medium-low,” says Martinez. “You’ll incorporate a lot of air into the salsa, but even more horribly, you will activate the pectin, and you’ll basically have salsa Jell-O.
“It’s happened to me, and it’s happened to a lot of my followers They’re like, ‘Oh my God, how did this happen?’ You’ll make the salsa, and taste it and think, oh, wow, this is great. And then, you know, you’re having company over and the salsa sits on the counter for like half an hour, and then all of a sudden, it’s literally the texture of Jell-O.”
Photo by Alex Lau. Reprinted with permission from Salsa Daddy: Dip Your Way into Mexican Cooking by Rick Martínez, copyright © 2025. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
6. Think salsa first
The phrase “salsa first” jumped out to us when we read Salsa Daddy. Salsa is often seen as a component to a meal, but if you flip the script and start with the salsa you might think about your cooking in a different way. Martinez explains.
“I think when you start with the salsa first, you can go in a lot of different directions,” he says. “If you’re making a taco there might be a specific salsa that you would want to pair with that dish, but if you start with the salsa first you can put it on a hamburger, fried fish or fried chicken.
“I think when you start with the salsa and you taste it like, what is it? What do you want to put it on? Does it want to be on a vegetable on a piece of meat? Is it charred? Is it fried? Is it, is it baked?
“The other thing that’s become my favorite easy weeknight meal is using salsa to braise a chicken. I’ll buy a chicken, cut it in half, sear both sides in a little bit of lard, and then just dump, two cups of salsa in the pan. I’ll cover it, put it on low and let it cook for about 40 minutes until the chicken is falling apart. I serve it with rice or beans or in a taco and it’s just so easy and so fast. It takes 10 minutes to sear the chicken, and then you just dump whatever salsa is hanging out in the fridge.”
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7. Consider the onion
Onions are a very common salsa ingredient, and after years of salsa-making, Martinez has some strong feelings about the best type of allium for the job—white onions. Can you use whatever you can find at your market? Absolutely, but Martinez makes a strong flavor case for the white onion.
“First of all, the white onion is the most common in Mexico, so people definitely use white onion more than anything else. Red onion is probably second, and there are very few yellow onions.
“I think, from a flavor perspective, the white onion is really great because it has an assertive flavor, but it has a very quick start and quick finish. So it kind of hits you, and then it goes away. I think yellow or Spanish onions, and certainly red onions, are very aggressive and they linger, which detracts a little from the flavor of the salsas. I would much rather have an onion that gives you just a burst of sort of flavor and then fades out, as opposed to something that’s just there throughout the entire bite.”
8. Sometimes you need to add fat
When you think of salsa, you probably don’t think about fat, but some of Martinez’s recipes call for frying the salsa. Here’s why.
“When I first started cooking in Mexico, I didn’t understand the idea of frying a liquid. Oftentimes, cooks will blend the salsa and then you fry it in lard or olive oil or neutral oil. And I didn’t understand what it did. But if you have a very hot oil, and you pour this liquid with a lot of suspended pieces of of chilies and vegetables, you’re caramelizing those and developing flavor.
“You’re taking out the water, you’re concentrating the flavor, you’re developing the sugars and you’re adding the caramelization. I don’t know the exact science behind it, but I do know that frying helps to emulsify the salsa and hold it together. Sometimes when you make a salsa and it sits you’ll get little puddles of water on the top. But when you fry it, it all comes together. And so you have moles that are this perfect consistency—thick and rich and creamy—and that happens because you’re frying them.”
9. Don’t forget the fruit
Many cooks lean into veggies when making salsa, but don’t forget about fruits. When we asked Martinez about some of his favorite surprising recipes in the book, his mind went right to fruit.
“I made a watermelon based salsa with chiles and that is really, really good,” he says. “You throw everything in a food processor and process it. It’s a really fun picnic/barbecue/cookout salsa. It’s summery and a little spicy and a little smoky.
“The peach and pecan salsa was another one that I didn’t know if it would work. I wanted to try it as an homage to my father because he grew pecan trees and and peach trees in Texas when I was growing up.
“I thought, ‘This is either going to be really horrible or really amazing.’ And it is so good. It’s one of my favorite salsas in the book. I think one thing that’s important when you’re using fruits to make salsa is that you need onion and garlic and chili, because it’s very easy for your brain to take fruit in a dessert direction. So the citrus, the garlic, the chilies, the onion, are going to move you into the salsa direction.”
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