Topo Chico Collabs With Chef Rick Martinez For Cinco De Mayo Party Dishes

Topo Chico was once just a Mexican brand of mineral water that was pretty popular in Texas, but it was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 2017 and soon became ubiquitous. The brand also started spiking its water, jumping right on board both the canned cocktail and hard seltzer trends. It comes as no surprise whatsoever, then, to find Topo Chico embracing Cinco de Mayo as a marketing opportunity for the latter product. Even though Cinco de Mayo isn't a major holiday in Mexico outside the Puebla region, it's been embraced by many Americans as yet another opportunity to booze it up a la St. Patrick's Day.

To this end, Topo Chico is partnering with Rick Martinez. The chef says he's created two new recipes, one for pollo el pastor that's meant to be paired with Topo Chico's margarita-flavored seltzer and the other for fried esquites meant to be paired with the strawberry-guava flavored kind. As Martinez says in a press release shared with Mashed, these pairings "[keep] things fresh while entertaining for Cinco de Mayo."

These new recipes may actually be slightly less new than advertised because Rick Martinez's book "Mi Cocina" contains recipes for both dishes. So just how similar are they? In the case of the fried esquites, the recipes really are quite similar, although the one from the cookbook doesn't use the word "fried" in its name. Still, the dish is cooked in much the same way, with the only real difference being that this new one created for Topo Chico only has three chiles de arbol instead of four and only calls for half as much corn. It also makes use of parsley and oregano instead of epazote, while it omits the crema and queso fresco altogether. And oddly enough, the new recipe calls for weighing out the salt in grams instead of measuring it with a teaspoon.

Unfortunately, we cannot compare the new pollo al pastor recipe to the one already published as we were unable to access the former. The latter, however, is a dish that Martinez has called a favorite of his. It is made with a whole chicken seasoned with achiote paste, garlic, chipotles, adobo sauce, vinegar, and agave syrup and cooked with onions and pineapple. If you like, you can eat the chicken taco-style by shredding it, then wrapping it in corn tortillas and topping it with salsa and cilantro.