Name: Rahanna Bisseret Martinez
Age: 18
Residence: Oakland, California.
Lives now: In a three-bedroom house in East Oakland with her mother and younger brother.
Claim to fame: Ms. Bisseret Martinez is a teenage chef and cookbook author known for spicy dishes that combine her Black, Mexican, and Haitian heritage, as well as her Northern California roots. She was featured in “Top Chef Junior,” interned at Chez Panisse and Dominique Ansel’s bakery, and created a popular roasted cabbage recipe with red pepper garlic butter that went viral on Facebook.
“Food can be expressed in so many different ways,” she said. “It’s important that we share cultures and give the original names to different cultural techniques.”
Breakthrough: Her fascination for cooking started at a young age. While her friends were watching “The Powerpuff Girls,” she was glued to public television, studying classic French chefs such as Julia Child and Jacques Pépin. She auditioned for “Master Chef Junior” after seeing a commercial for it. Although she was not accepted, the producers remembered her and reached out for “Top Chef Junior,” a similar show with contestants ages 9 to 14.
She was second, cooking dishes such as cilantro-lime lamb chops and sweet potato-pecan pie with a lemon thyme ice cream and cajeta sauce. She was also featured in ‘Guy’s Grocery Games’, a cooking show set in a supermarket. †TV has come a long way since I watched it when I was 10,” she said.
Latest project: After contributing recipes and essays to other cookbooks, Ms. Bisseret Martinez has written her own “Flavor + Us,” which will be published by 4 Color Books, an imprint featuring chefs of color started by Bryant Terry, a vegan chef. cook and cookbook author in California.
The 80 recipes include sweet scones inspired by Mexican pastries, a healthier carbonara pasta made with herbs and eggplant, and a variation on her rib eye tostadas she made on “Guy’s Grocery Games.” “I want to teach the home cook global techniques that affect cooking in Northern California,” she said.
Next thing: Ms. Bisseret Martinez recently started working as a prep chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. “I handle and process a lot of the vegetables,” she said. “I can’t even count how many fava beans I probably cleaned and peeled and prepped and ready to go.” She graduated from high school last month and will study hospitality at Cornell University in the fall.
Teamwork: “I really like the team aspect of cooking in restaurants,” she said of working in a professional kitchen. “It’s a lot of prep work early in the morning for a big payout at the end of the day. It’s a special night for people.”
