The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters · American Public Media

833: Salsa, Sauces & Sides with Rick Martínez and Sunny Lee

·49 min·4 clips

Rick Martínez discovered a salsa that blew his mind: caramelized onions with a spicy serrano kick.

Francis Lam opens on the feeling of late-summer farmers' market shopping. He dwells on that overlap between summer and fall, when the produce table makes dinner planning feel especially open. Rick joins for a conversation about salsa. The talk starts with texture and soon widens into what a sauce should actually do on the plate. Rick is blunt about a salsa that turns into something like a morning smoothie. That line gives the discussion a sharp practical edge. Francis and Rick move into cooked salsas. One focus is salsa suiza, the sauce behind enchiladas suizas. Rick offers the theory he likes best for the name. In his telling, the white cheese and melted top made the dish look like the Swiss Alps to Mexicans in the 1930s. He notes that other explanations exist. He still prefers the visual story because it is vivid and easy to hold onto. Rick then turns to the original version he found while researching the book. That version included a decent amount of sesame seeds. Those seeds are not just a decorative detail. They help temper acidity and change the texture of the sauce, along with its flavor. The conversation keeps circling back to the relationship between technique and appetite. Sunny Lee closes the episode with a different but related register of kitchen thought, talking about seasonality and using what is available. She leaves listeners with a recipe for pickled mushrooms and tahini. Her restaurant, Sun's, is in New York City. The episode keeps returning to the idea that good cooking follows what is on hand without losing intention. It ends with sauce, memory, and seasonality all in the same frame.

As heard by us

A salsa episode that turns texture and origin stories into usable kitchen instincts.

Francis Lam and Rick Martinez treat salsa as more than a dip: it becomes a useful lens for texture, origin, and the small choices that make a sauce work on a plate.

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Why you'd press play

You want salsa ideas that come with texture, history, and a recipe you can actually use.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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