SLO County cook competes on new PBS show ‘The Great American Recipe’
.jpeg "Silvia Martinez of Morro Bay is among the contestants on the new PBS competition show “The Great American Recipe,” which debuts Friday, June 24, 2020.")
Whenever Morro Bay resident Silvia Martinez cooks, she’s thinking about other people — a grandmother in Germany, for instance, or a mom in New Mexico.
“I want people to experience something that is good, that is yummy, that is good for your body,” said Martinez, who shares recipes through her popular blog, Mama Latina Tips. “It’s something that always fills my heart.”
Martinez will delve into her love of food and her culinary heritage on the new reality competition “The Great American Recipe,” which premiered June 24 on PBS.
Hosted by Alejandra Ramos with judges Leah Cohen, Tiffany Derry and Graham Elliot, the show follows 10 talented home cooks as they “showcase signature dishes, share heartfelt stories and compete to win the national search for ‘The Great American Recipe,’ ” according to PBS.
Over the course of eight episodes, “We’re going to share our love of food and the stories behind some of the recipes,” Martinez explained.
According to Martinez, producers invited her to appear on the show after tracking her down on Instagram. She spent three weeks filming in Virginia in September.
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Although “The Great American Recipe” identifies Martinez as a San Luis Obispo resident, she’s called Morro Bay home for a little less than a year. Before that, she said, she lived in Los Osos.
But Martinez’s cooking journey began south of the border about three hours from Mexico City.
“Food has always been my passion, since I was very little,” she said. “I grew up in a Mexican family that loved to cook and chat in the kitchen.”
“I was around 12 when I actually told my grandmother and my mom that I wanted to started learning how to cook,” she recalled. “Two years later, I was the cook in the house. It was a passion of mine. It came easy to me.”
She rekindled that culinary passion after she met her husband in Guanajuato in central Mexico and the two moved to the Central Coast. Martinez had worked for the University of Guanajuato in the human resources department, but she struggled to find a job in the same field in the United States.
After a stint as a loan officer, Martinez started a bilingual lifestyle blog in 2009 “because I wanted to connect with other Latina moms,” she said.
“I started also putting in my recipes,” added Martinez, who has two sons, ages 14 and 18. “I didn’t want my family recipes to get lost. Nobody was actually documenting them.”
Food content soon came to dominate Mama Latina Tips, which gets an estimated 10,000 views per day. Martinez has more than 16,000 Instagram followers, 48,000 Facebook followers and 71,000 followers on TikTok.
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Although Martinez’s blog is centered on Mexican and Latino cuisine, she said she cooks “using produce that you can find living in California, food that I didn’t grow up eating.”
“I find it very inspiring when I can take from other cuisines and create something new, so (my readers) can get exposed to the world through my food,” she said. “It’s just the beauty of being in the world. In California we have exposure to so many cuisines that we can make our own.”
Martinez can’t discuss “The Great American Recipe” in depth before it airs, but she described it as “so uplifting and so into food and families (that) it was just perfect for me.”
“It reminds me a little of ‘The Great British Baking Show.’ It has the same feeling,” she said, as well as a similar camaraderie between cooks.
“The Great American Recipe” features cooks who are influenced by a variety of global flavors, from a small business banker in Portland, Oregon, who loves Filipino fusion food to a social media manager in Minneapolis whose favorite dish is Korean-style tacos.
Martinez’s signature dishes include pozole verde, a hominy-based stew that gets its green hue from tomatillos, and sopa tarasca, a pinto bean-based soup with tomatoes and chile ancho topped with crispy tortilla strips, avocado and queso fresco.
“It’s very yummy, if I say so myself,” Martinez said with a chuckle, “but also very pretty to look at as well.”
For sweet treats, she loves pan dulce, a crunchy, sweet puff pastry bread, and pastel de tres leches, a layered sponge cake soaked in a creamy mix of evaporated milk, condensed milk and half-and-half.
“It’s very rewarding when I receive an email from someone” saying that they’ve tried one of her recipes, Martinez said, adding that she recently heard from a German grandma who made her tres leches cake.
“If I can teach someone to make it at home with their families and they’re happy, I’m very happy as well,” she said.
Watch PBS show ‘The Great American Recipe’
“The Great American Recipe” airs at 9 p.m. Friday on PBS.
This story was originally published June 23, 2022 at 3:23 PM with the headline "SLO County cook competes on new PBS show ‘The Great American Recipe’."
