our story

every bottle has a story. this is mine.

- david martin

i grew up in a family where cooking was simply part of life. when i was very young, my family lived with my great-grandmother, and some of my earliest memories are of my father learning to cook german food alongside her. we didn't have a lot of money, so most meals were made at home. my parents became very good at taking modest ingredients, stretching a meal, and making it something you actually looked forward to eating.

that meant a lot of time around the kitchen. my sister and i helped when we could, and holidays were taken very seriously. christmas in particular meant big meals, homemade german cookies, and the extra care that turns ordinary food into something special. those habits (and quite a bit of german tradition) stuck with me.

my father went to culinary school later in life, hoping to open a restaurant of his own. he did some catering and worked in professional kitchens, and i remember helping him with one of his catering jobs in particular. it was just the two of us in a large commercial kitchen, and i got to watch him work.

he wasn’t a baker. he didn't seem particularly interested in following a recipe to the letter. he enjoyed the process. he started with a flavorful base, tasted it, added something, tasted again, adjusted it, and kept working until it became something much better than what he started with.

i still cook that way.

not long after starting his career in the kitchen, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. he never got the chance to open the restaurant he dreamed about, and he passed away in 2012. but the way he approached cooking (and his combination of creativity, craftsmanship, and entrepreneurial drive) is something i carry with me.

the first bottle

culture & kick didn't begin with a business plan. it began with my nephew brayden bringing a bottle of hot sauce to a family fourth of july weekend.

i didn't know brayden particularly well at the time. he was my sister's son, and i wanted to find a way to become a bigger part of his life. we didn't have a lot of obvious things in common, but i knew one thing: the kid liked hot sauce.

that was enough of an opening for me.

i already knew how to cook. what i didn't know was how to turn that knowledge into a great hot sauce. so i started digging into pepper fermentation and brought the techniques i'd learned from years in the kitchen along for the ride. i wanted something with some heat but not something outrageous, so serranos became the base. garlic and onion went into the ferment because (thanks to years of cooking with my parents) i knew they made almost everything better.

a few weeks later, i blended it, tasted it, adjusted it…

and there it was.

the process wasn’t perfect, but the recipe itself? somehow, it was. brayden loved it, and then he asked me to make another one. “can you make one hotter?”

that was the beginning.

i've made plenty of sauces since then, some that i think are pretty damn good. but that original serrano is “no notes.” i've learned a hell of a lot since that first batch, but i've never found a reason to change that recipe.

simply.

there are plenty of hot sauces built around one question: how hot can we make this?

that's not what i'm interested in.

i don't actually love super-spicy food. i like a good table salsa, buffalo wings somewhere in the middle of the heat scale, and sriracha in my ramen, as long as i don't get carried away. what i really love is what peppers bring to food.

mexican food was a big part of that realization for me. fresh peppers and dried chiles can bring grassy, vegetal, fruity, floral, smoky, earthy, and deeply savory flavors that you simply can't get from most other ingredients. in things like enchilada sauces, queso, and especially mole, the chile isn't there just to make the food hot. it's there because it tastes good.

that's how i approach hot sauce.

i don't start with the question of how much heat i can tolerate. i start with the pepper. what makes this particular variety interesting? what can i add that will make that quality stand out? what can i leave out so i don't cover it up?

first, do no harm.

a serrano already has a wonderful grassy character and a clean heat. maybe it needs some garlic and onion. maybe it needs acidity. but it doesn't need six more ingredients just because i have six more ingredients sitting on the shelf.

these peppers are the stars. my job is to help them shine.

cultured.

fermentation is part of that story too.

i've played around with fermentation over the years. i’ve done pickles, sauerkraut, and plenty of experiments that were mostly just for fun. but fermentation brings an entire new cast of flavors to the party. done well, it creates depth and complexity that can be difficult to achieve any other way.

but “cultured.” means more than fermentation.

it also means culture in the broadest sense: food, music, art, people, traditions, and the incredible variety of ways humans have found to create and share things. cooking is an art, and some of the best food ideas in the world come from cultures completely different from our own.

that's something i want culture & kick to reflect.

i want to explore peppers as individual ingredients, learn what makes them different, grow them, ferment them, cook with them, and find new ways to make them shine. i don't want every bottle to taste like every other bottle. i want there to be a reason each one exists.

what's next:

culture & kick is growing—literally.

our rotating limited-edition sauces give us room to keep experimenting and exploring the enormous world of peppers. there are more varieties than i can count, and seemingly endless ways to highlight what makes each one unique.

for spring 2027 i'm building a much larger pepper garden, with the goal of growing many of the peppers that eventually make their way into culture & kick sauces. thinking about seed-to-bottle sauces really makes me smile. some peppers will be sold fresh. and some will probably lead me down a rabbit hole i haven't even discovered yet.

our goal is to become a fixture in the texas hot sauce scene while continuing to explore what peppers, good ingredients, and fermentation can do.

but wherever culture & kick goes, i want to remember where it started: a family kitchen, a chef who taught me how to build flavor, and a kid with a bottle of hot sauce who gave me a reason to make the first one.

from the bottom of my heart, thank you for supporting culture & kick—whether you've bought a bottle, shared a post, encouraged me, told somebody about us, or simply spent a few minutes here getting to know what we're doing.

it all means more than you know.

thanks for being here.