Cynthia L. Herzog .jpeg)
Silvia Martinez of Morro Bay is among the contestants in the new PBS contest “The Great American Recipe,” which begins Friday, June 24, 2020.
Anytime Morro Bay resident Silvia Martinez cooks, she thinks of other people – a grandmother in Germany, for example, or a mother in New Mexico.
“I want people to experience something good, delicious, good for your body,” said Martinez, who shares recipes via her popular blog, Latina mom advice. “It’s something that always fills my heart.”
Martinez will delve into his love of food and his culinary heritage in the new reality contest “The Great American Recipe” premieres Friday on PBS.
Hosted by Alejandra Ramos with judges Leah Cohen, Tiffany Derry and Graham Elliot, the show follows 10 talented home cooks as they “feature 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’ll be sharing our love of food and the stories behind some of the recipes,” Martinez explained.
According to Martinez, the producers invited her to appear on the show after finding her on Instagram. She spent three weeks filming in Virginia in September.
.png "Competitors Photo barn (1).png")
Although “The Great American Recipe” identifies Martinez as a resident of San Luis Obispo, she has lived in Morro Bay for just under a year. Before that, she said, she lived in Los Osos.
But Martinez’s culinary journey began south of the border about three hours from Mexico City.
“Food has always been my passion, ever since I was 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 told my grandmother and my mother that I wanted to start learning to cook,” she recalls. “Two years later, I was the house cook. It was one of my passions. It came easily to me.
She reignited this culinary passion after meeting 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 had difficulty finding 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 also started posting my recipes,” added Martinez, who has two sons, ages 14 and 18. “I didn’t want my family’s recipes to be lost. No one was actually documenting them.
Food content quickly dominated Mama Latina Tips, which gets an estimate 10,000 views per day. Martinez has over 16,000 Instagram followers, 48,000 Facebook followers and 71,000 subscribers on ICT Tac.
.jpg "o-pastel-tres-leches-rebanada-frente (1).jpg")
Although Martinez’s blog focuses on Mexican and Latin cuisine, she said she cooks “using stuff you can find in California, stuff I didn’t eat growing up.”
“I find it very inspiring when I can draw inspiration from other cuisines and create something new, so that (my readers) can be exposed to the world through my food,” she said. “IThat’s just the beauty of being in the world. In California, we are exposed 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 bit of ‘The Great British Baking Show.’ There’s the same feeling,” she said, along with a similar camaraderie between the cooks.
“The Great American Recipe” features cooks influenced by a variety of global flavors, from a small business banker in Portland, Oregon who loves Filipino fusion cuisine to alsosocial media manager in Minneapolis whose favorite dish is Korean 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 ancho chili topped with crispy tortilla strips, avocado and queso fresco.
“It’s very delicious, if I say so myself,” Martinez said with a chuckle, “but also very pretty to look at too.”
For sweets, she likes pan dulce, a crispy and sweet flaky bread, and pastel de tres leches, a layered sponge cake dipped in a creamy mixture of evaporated milk, condensed milk and half and half.
“It’s very gratifying when I get an email from someone” saying they’ve tried one of her recipes, Martinez said, adding that she recently heard from a German grandmother who made her tres leches cake.
“If I can teach someone to do it at home with their family and they’re happy, I’m very happy too,” she said.
Watch “The Great American Recipe” on PBS
“The Great American Recipe” airs at 9 p.m. Friday on PBS.
