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Rick Martinez

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Mazatlán
Rick Martinez

Rick Martinez is a chef, writer, and digital creator with a deep love of Mexican culture and cuisine.

08/09/2026

Frijoles charros, frijoles a la charra, or charro beans are incredibly comforting to me because I have so many memories of my dad and grandma making them.

My dad was usually the one who made beans at home. He learned from his mom, inherited her bean pot when she died, and when my dad died, I got the pot. Beans are a big part of my family history.

He always had quarts of beans in the freezer, and when I came home to visit, he’d pull one out and make frijoles charros. His version was pretty simple: tomato, jalapeño, onion, garlic and bacon. Sometimes he’d add smoked sausage.

Frijoles charros come from the northeastern states of Nuevo León, Coahuila and Tamaulipas. They’re brothy beans made with onion, green chile, tomato, bacon and cilantro, and they’re named for Mexican charros, or skilled horsemen.

Over the years, people have added more and more to that basic recipe. Every cook gives it their own little flourish, and today you’ll see versions with chorizo, salchichas, ham, chicharrones, chicharrón prensado, cueritos and all kinds of other pork products.

While I was studying the recipes, I noticed that the older versions tended to be simpler, while the newer ones often use a lot more meat.

I am a huge fan of pork, so I am never going to pass up a bowl of porky beans. But with all of those intensely flavored meats, you can start to lose the flavor of the beans. The name of the dish is FRIJOLES a la charra after all, not pork with a hint of bean. I want to taste the frijoles first.

Comment BEANS and I’ll send you the link to read the full story.

03/09/2026

I had so much fun feeding the TODAY Show anchors and crew these smash burger tacos!

They’re super easy, ridiculously delicious and perfect for a Labor Day BBQ.

I’m sure everybody has heard of smash burger tacos. They’ve been around on social media for a while, and they always looked really good to me. But I love a good burger, and frankly, I love a good bun too. So the idea of swapping out the bun for a tortilla was never that appealing to me.

A lot of the versions I saw online were basically a burger in a tortilla: secret sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, the whole thing. They looked good, but I was never super motivated to make one.

Then I started seeing people making arayes, Middle Eastern meat-stuffed pitas cooked until the bread gets crisp and the spiced meat stays juicy inside, and that brought me around to trying the technique.

But instead of making a burger using a tortilla, I wanted to make a smashed taco. I wanted it to taste like a taco, with salsa and an unmistakably Mexican flavor.

So I griddled very thinly sliced red onion, poblano and jalapeño, smashed the beef into the vegetables, then topped it with a flour tortilla. You get all those caramelized bits of poblano, jalapeño and red onion pressed right into the beef.

Then you flip it, top it with queso Oaxaca until it gets nice and melty, and serve it with avocado, lime and pico de gallo.

You get crispy edges on the tortilla, perfectly cooked beef, deeply caramelized vegetables and melty cheese. It’s ridiculously good. And the TODAY Show loved it too!

If you want to make them for Labor Day, comment TACO and I’ll send the link to the newsletter and recipe!

01/09/2026

Carnitas are one of my favorite dishes in Mexico. They’re pieces of pork cooked until they’re falling-apart tender and then browned in their own rendered pork fat. They have a concentrated pork flavor and oftentimes a combination of textures that are both crunchy and melt-in-your-mouth tender.

I think a lot of people outside of Mexico believe there is one way or a correct way to make every Mexican dish. But Mexican food is interpreted, made and personalized by cooks across the country, and carnitas are a perfect example.

Think of carnitas as a broad category of recipes with one thing in common: pork cooked in fat until it’s tender. Everything else is up to you.

I like to think of carnitas along two different spectrums: flavor and texture. On the flavor spectrum, one end is pure pork flavor: manteca, pork, salt and water. That’s it. On the other end are orange, onion, garlic, chiles, herbs, spices, sweetened condensed milk, Coke and many, many more. The sky’s the limit.

Then there’s the texture spectrum. On one end, you have carnitas suaves, meat cooked until it’s falling apart, then shredded or chopped and tossed in the reduced cooking juices and fat. It’s smooth, rich and packed with umami. On the other end, you have carnitas doradas, deeply browned and really crisp, almost like chicharrones, but still soft and tender on the inside.

The history is really interesting because domestic pigs are not native to Mexico. They were brought over by the Spanish in 1519, so relatively speaking, this iconically Mexican dish is actually fairly young. The earliest printed recipe I was able to find was published in 1845. Even though carnitas wasn’t used in the title, the author wrote that these pieces of pork were commonly called carnitas. So clearly, the dish is older than 1845.

In the recipe I’ve written, I add extra aromatics, orange and cinnamon because I like those flavors, but if you want pure pork flavor, leave them out. I’ve also included instructions for making both the crispy version and the soft, rich, tender, juicy version.

Comment CARNITAS to read the full story.

29/08/2026

As many of you already know, I absolutely adore this time of year. When I lived in New York, late August and September were, to me, the best time to go to the farmers market. I was a frequent visitor at the Union Square Farmers Market during this peak-season summer glory.

Everything that I absolutely adore in life is perfectly ripe and beautiful and vibrant and gorgeous right now. I’m lucky enough to be in New York for work and I decided I had to get my fill of heirloom tomatoes, jersey peaches and summer berries.

And as I did when I lived here for 20 years, I completely loaded up my bags with produce. Probably the only difference is that this time I didn’t buy plants, which I normally would have done as well. Then cursing myself all the way home having to haul all this bounty uptown in a crowded train.

But it’s so beautiful and it was the perfect summer day, warm but not humid or too hot. If you’re in New York, I highly encourage you to go to the Union Square Farmers Market. Even if you’re not buying anything, just the sheer beauty of nature in all her glory, the colors and the smells. And obviously there are samples, which are great because, if you’re like me, you take a sample and then decide, yes, I definitely need to buy that.

I was also excited because I was buying ingredients to make entomatadas for a friend tomorrow. So I’m going to eat half of the tomatoes I bought today and save the other half for tomorrow.

Happy Saturday!

28/08/2026

Thank you so much to everyone who came out today for tortas, tacos and burritos! It was so much fun meeting and talking to all of you! And thank you to the incredible team at Los Burritos Juarez for all of your hard work and incredible food. And huge thank you to Chef Alan Delgado for welcoming me into your home and working so hard to make this collab a deliciouly joyful experience!

26/08/2026

Hey New York friends!

I’ll be in New York this Friday, August 28, doing a collab with losburritosjuarez !

I’ve got three things on the menu: burritos de albóndigas, tortas de lechón and tacos gobernador.

We’ll start serving at noon and go until we sell out. I’ll probably be there from about 11:30 to 2, so come by, hang out, say hi and grab some yummy food.

25/08/2026

💔 I will always love you Dolly. 💔

25/08/2026

One of the things I loved most about researching carne en su jugo was seeing all of the different ways people make it.

Even in Guadalajara in the 1960s and ’70s, the restaurants that helped make the dish famous were all putting their spin on it, giving customers a reason to come in and try their version of it. They were competing with each other to steal customers and so they changed their broth, the chiles, the beans, the garnishes, how the beef was cooked. And that continued as carne en su jugo spread into the home kitchens, through Jalisco and the rest of Mexico.

That made developing this recipe really fun for me. I read through the history, looked at all the variations I could find and decided what I wanted my own version to taste like.

So this week’s newsletter is both the story of how this relatively young Guadalajara dish became a classic, and the development of my own bacon-y, rich and beef-y carne en su jugo.

Comment CARNE and I’ll send you the link to read the whole story!

23/08/2026

I’m making Carne en Su Jugo (beef cooked in its own juices) for my newsletter Sazón tomorrow! It’s a Jalisco specialty that took off in Guadalajara in the 1960s. The Universidad de Guadalajara traces it back to 1963 and Juan José Gálvez, known as “El Gallo,” although there are a few competing stories about exactly who made it first. What started as restaurant dish became so popular that people started making it at home, and now it’s one of Guadalajara‘s most iconic dishes (along with torta ahogada) made with thinly sliced beef cooked with bacon in a tomatillo, jalapeño or serrano broth, then served with beans, onion, cilantro and radishes.

18/08/2026

I adore meatballs! They’re incredibly comforting and satisfying no matter what country the recipe comes from. And with all the beautiful corn, tomatoes, chiles and squash at the mercado right now, I decided to make caldo de albóndigas (Mexican meatball soup) with all of that peak-season August produce in one pot.

I think part of the reason I love them so much is because of my mom. She used to make some of the best spaghetti and meatballs I’ve ever had. When she came home from work, she’d pick me up from daycare, and I’d drag this heavy wooden chair from the dining room over to the stove, stand on it and wait for her to come into the kitchen and tell me what we were making.

I was her little assistant, stirring the pots while she explained what she was doing and why. Those are some of the fondest memories I have of her. I owe her everything I know about food, cooking and cooking with love.

So, yes, I have feelings about meatballs.

And now there’s a giant pot of caldo de albóndigas in my kitchen waiting for me!

Comment MEATBALLS and I’ll send you the link to the newsletter and recipe!

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