Salsa Mexicana Two Ways

today it's two versions of mexico's most iconic salsa [Music] you probably know this salsa is pico de gallo but to tell you the truth in mexico most of the time it's just called salsa mexicana mexican salsa because it is so incredibly iconic that it is really associated with mexico and um it always has the same basic ingredients in it a few variations but um there are the tomatoes and onions and green chili and cilantro things that we all like but each one of those things contributes a different aspect a different flavor and texture to the finished salsa so there's no real recipe here this is something you will make to suit your own taste and as we work through each ingredient i'll explain to you what it brings to the party so obviously tomatoes is the number one thing here you want to make this with really ripe tomatoes when i can't find really ripe tomatoes i'll probably use cherry tomatoes and cut those up you need a sharp knife to cut tomatoes because they have a very tough skin what i usually do is cut each side off of the tomato like that and then use the tip of my knife to cut out the little the place where the stem connected because that's tough too so you want to get that out of there and then i slice the tomato like this and then cut each one of those slices into dice now this may seem really laborious to you but i will tell you that making great pico de gallo salsa mexicana is really a labor of love and the smaller the pieces the better the pico de gallo because all of the flavors will come together then and they'll all speak in unison and that is what we do when we're chopping things small is to bring them all all of the flavors together so cutting down into strips and then cutting those strips at a 90 degree angle to the first cuts into little dice so that does it takes a little while to do it i got started ahead of time here last piece here to cut up and again i will say working with a sharp knife this whole thing goes way way faster okay i'm going to scoop all of this now into a bowl and we're going to go to the second ingredient well i guess i should tell you what tomatoes bring to it and if you've ever had a great summer tomato from the farmer's market or picked off of a bush in your own backyard you know that there is that beautiful balance of sweet and tanginess okay sweet and tart and that will give that's what this is bringing to the the salsa but also a very melting tender texture so we like those things for that now well let's talk about the onion in mexico they don't use the white the yellow onion they use the white onion because the onion is this onion the white one is crisp in texture so that's one of the things it's going to add but it's really bright in flavor it doesn't add more sweetness like some of the vidalia type onions the sweet onions would do now the amount of onion that i like to this amount of tomato is not a lot okay i like to cut well so this is a large onion here so i'm going to take about a third of it off here and that's going to be the right amount for me you may like more so feel free to add more or less so i'm going to cut this across in strips like that and then go the opposite direction again working with small pieces because we really want the flavor of the onion to be evenly distributed through this salsa okay once that is all chopped up i'm going to scoop that now into a strainer because this is the most important thing that i can teach you about making this salsa is to rinse the onion we have created a sulfurous compound when we cut that onion up we can get rid of that sulfurous compound and that remember that's the stuff that makes your eyes water and it gives you that onion breath or maybe upset your stomach we created it we can get rid of it we're going to rinse off under cold running water rinse all of that off and this is going to as they say in spanish deflame the onion it's going to take all of that really strong flavor away so i usually just tap the strainer on the side of the sink to get all of the water off of it put that in the bowl there with the tomatoes now let's talk about chilies any kind of green chili will work in this most people will go for serrano or jalapeno but if you like it extra spicy habanero could work in this which we'll talk about a little bit later but also any kind of green chili that you perhaps are growing in your garden you can always use them each one will have a different flavor and a different heat level so i'm working with a very common uh chili that you can buy in grocery stores which is the serrano which is my go-to green chili because it is reliably spicy um jalapenos are not really and i'm going to cut it up just like they would in a typical mexican kitchen now in here in the middle you can see that there is this seed pod here and the seeds are all embedded into it there are some veins this is we would call it a vein here that part of it is where all the heat is if you want to get a lot of green chili flavor without a lot of heat you want to cut that whole seed pod out and the vein because that's the concentration of capsaicin the hot part i want the heat here so i'm simply just going to cut these lengthwise like that and then cut those across but that's still going to leave these pieces of serrano too big for me so i want them to be very well distributed through this salsa so i'm going to just rock and chop across several times to actually mince this serrano chili here okay that's getting much smaller now and about where i want it to be so i'm going to stop and scoop all of that up and put that into the bowl now if you just look in that bowl for a second doesn't that remind you of the mexican flag right there red white and green and that is one of the reasons that this salsa is called salsa mexicana because it really embodies the that beauty of the mexican flag the red white and green and those three ingredients that are so incredibly iconic um in mexican cooking now the last is another green ingredient here and that's going to be the cilantro again as much or as little of of this as you want to put i'm kind of a cilantro freak so i put a fair amount of it in here i'm going to do the standard mexican chop on it which is really just a very thin slice so you i sort of tuck some of the top leaves under and then i'm holding everything tight i'm going to cut across this cilantro stems leaves and all just inching bit by bit my left hand back until i pretty much just run out of leaves and i really just have mostly the stems left there and i'll get rid of those guys i've got a couple of big leaves here at the end that i want to chop up and then we'll put that into the bowl with all the rest of the ingredients when it comes to seasonings it's a salsa so you want everything to be seasoned highly and there are two seasonings that go into this one is lime juice to perk everything up to give it a nice zing because any kind of condiment we usually think will have sort of a tanginess to it and the second thing is salt i'm going to put the salt in there first now this amount of salsa for me takes a scant teaspoon of salt so i'm just going to measure in that scant teaspoon of salt and then cut open a lime i highly recommend that you do this with fresh squeezed lime juice grab a lime use a mexican lime juicer and turn that lime half inside out and give it a good squeeze of fresh lime juice there now this may surprise a lot of you but i will tell you that i think this salsa is way way better after it has set for about an hour or so the onion will integrate it will change a little bit of its texture softening just a tiny bit but all the flavors will come together really really nicely i'm going to see about flavor on this so i'm going to take just a little taste to see if my salt level and my acid level from the lime juice are about right it's a great place to be i may come back and re-season a little bit it's spicy it's crunchy it's sweet it's herbal it's all the things that a great salsa mexicana should be so um put this into a serving bowl just so that you can see how beautiful it is when you've chopped everything very nicely into small pieces here and you can stop just at that giving it a little time but wait there's more now down in the yucatan they don't call it pico de gallo or salsa mexicana they call it schneepek but basically it's just a variation on that theme and sometimes it could look very much like what you would find in central mexico but oftentimes they make a couple substitutions so i've got my tomatoes chopped and the cilantro chopped and then i have red onion that is substituting for the white onion it's in the strainer because i just rinsed it off so i'm going to put that now into the bowl and the instead of the serrano chili i'm going to use abanero chili which is incredibly aromatic you may think of it as incredibly hot which it is but i think of it as having a very unique flavor now this i'm going to put only a half of one of these in here and because i'm fairly cavalier you might want to use some sort of latex gloves or something when you're doing this chopping because then you can take those off and all the capsaicin from the chili won't be on your fingers there's no way to get it really off of your fingers some people say a mild bleach solution but i don't know if you really want to stick your hands in bleach but basically it'll just rub off so washing your hands a whole lot will take it off but it will stay there for some time so i'm going to cut this half up again i'm doing the the seed pod veins seeds everything cutting crosswise and then doing that rock and chop now i can already smell it because this is to me one of the most aromatic chilies in the world and it always smells like tropical fruit to me some people would say kiwi or strawberries but i think it's a little bit more like guavas something that's got a more tropical aroma to it okay so that is i'm going to put into here and then we're going to add to it another ingredient that is not super common in everybody's shinipek out in the yucatan peninsula but i really like it because it gives you another flavor and texture especially texture and that is some radish i've already cut up some of the radish here but the radish i'm going to treat it more or less like i would the the tomato by slicing it crosswise here and then taking each one of those little radish slices and chopping those into small pieces now i like these to be small too because they really will add a beautiful texture to every bite of salsa but they also give you that sort of radish spiciness it's a very different kind of spice than a fresh chili will add to it but i kind of like that too so you want about well i want about a half a cup you can put as much or as little of this in or just leave it out if you wanted to the about a half a cup is what i usually go for in the chopped radish and then i'm going to scoop all of that into our bowl here with the ones that i've already chopped up here this was just three radishes that we have here so i'll scoop all of that in there now the the citrus in the yucatan is typically sour orange for something like this sour orange looks like a knobby orange and it is it's sort of the this root stock that all sweet orange trees are grafted onto because it's incredibly resistant to any kind of disease so lots of times you will find that root stock but then when they graft on sweet it produces sweet oranges but if they let that just grow it would produce this sort of knobby looking orange that is as sour as a lemon so you could use that if you can find it i'm going to do a kind of cheaters version of it which is to put some lime juice in here and then i'm going to cut up an orange and squeeze a little bit of this orange juice in there because when you taste a sour orange it's not very orangey it has hints of orange but not a whole lot so i'm just going to squeeze in some orange juice here we of course have to have this salt again i'm going for about a scant teaspoon after it sits for a little while i would reseason it if i thought it was necessary and there you have yucatan style salsa mexicana called schneepek i'm just going to put it over it you it it doesn't look that different from a regular salsa mexicana here but it really tastes a lot different because of the habanero chili in there and that little hint of orangey like flavor two versions of salsa mexicana to level up your taco game i think or any kind of grilled food salsa mexicana especially in the middle of the summer when the tomatoes are so good there's nothing that beats that

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 75,366

Rating: 4.9654655 out of 5

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Id: yRHtKBd9TVM

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 23 2021