A Simple Format for Mexican-Style Salsas
A Formula for Infinite Salsa Making
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Hey, everyone!
Today’s post is all about Mexican-style salsas. I spent two years living and cooking in Mexico, and learning the art and science of salsa was one of my biggest takeaways— I personally think the saucework in Mexican cuisine is unparalleled.
I love thinking about cooking in terms of formats rather than recipes. Formats are frameworks that give you guidance while also leaving room for customization and experimentation. And they make it easy to freestyle based on what you have available.
Recipes give exact measurements and instructions. Formats involve a few core ingredients that you can mix and match in all kinds of different ways.
This is the format I like to use to make incredible Mexican-style salsas. There’s a lot of room for variation here, and these salsas can be used for everything from tacos to enchiladas, burritos, chiles rellenos, or even just as a dip for tortilla chips.
This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive guide to every type of salsa imaginable— that would be impossible. I’ve encountered so many different types of salsa throughout Mexico, many of which incorporate nuts and seeds, fruits, or even beer or mezcal. This is instead meant to be a formula that you can use to reliably produce versatile salsas with just a few primary components.
Most salsas are a combination of the following:
tomatoes or tomatillos
chiles
onion
garlic
salt and acid (in the form of lime juice or vinegar)
(optional) fresh cilantro
Those core components form the building blocks. If you have any form of these available, you can make a salsa. Within this format, you can make infinite customization. Exact ratios of each of these ingredients don't matter— as long as you have a bit of each, you can simply use your taste to guide you.
Let’s break it down further.
The Components
Tomatoes or Tomatillos
Tomatoes and/or tomatillos often form the base of salsas. They lend body, flavor, and acidity. They can be raw, roasted, charred, or boiled.
However, you can make salsas that omit tomatoes or tomatillos entirely and instead get their body from dried chiles (like this salsa roja). In this case you can add all of the other components and thin out the salsa with liquid if need be.
Chiles
Chiles add body, flavor, and heat. They can take a few different forms— dried chiles (that are then toasted and/or rehydrated), fresh chiles (that can be raw, roasted, charred, or boiled), or even chile powder in a pinch.
Onion
Red onion, yellow onion, and white onion all work well in salsas. You can even experiment with other forms of onion like scallions or green onions.
These can be raw, roasted, charred, boiled or even sauteed.
Garlic
Garlic can be raw, cooked, or even powdered in a pinch.
Salt + Acid
Finally, salt and acid should be used to balance out the final salsa.
Salt is always added, but other forms of acid are optional. I’ll sometimes add lime juice or vinegar to salsas (especially if I’m not using tomatoes or tomatillos). Often the acidity in those ingredients is enough that additional acid isn’t needed.
(Optional) Fresh Cilantro
This is totally optional, but many salsas incorporate fresh herbs (most often cilantro in Mexican cuisine). If you do decide to do this, you should add it in at the end after any cooking takes place in order to preserve the freshness of the herbs.
The Process
Many salsas like these can be split into two categories— raw or cooked.
With raw salsas, you take the raw components and either blend them together (raw salsa verde, for example), or chop them and mix them together (pico de gallo).
Cooked salsas involve cooking one or more of the components. There are a ton of different ways to do this. You can roast them, broil them, char them on a grill, sautee them, or even boil them all together. Then you blend them to form them into a sauce.
The easiest way to do this, in my opinion, is to simply char all of the components on a dry cast iron skillet until they’re slightly blackened and cooked.
A quick note on garlic: I learned this technique in Mexico and I use it all the time. Roast the garlic cloves in a hot pan with their skins on. The outside will char, but it will allow the bulb to roast without burning. Let them cool, peel, and then use them in the salsa.
Raw salsas tend to be very bright, acidic, and vegetal. Cooked salsas take on more complexity and nuance.
Raw salsas are nice because they come together so quickly— just add the ingredients to a blender and mix. But I often prefer cooked salsas for their additional notes. One trick I’ll often do is make a raw salsa in a blender, and then add that to a saucepan over medium heat with a bit of oil and cook it down until it’s slightly reduced. That way you get the flavor and complexity of a cooked salsa without having to individually cook each component.
A Recent Salsa I Made
three Roma tomatoes
two jalepeños
three cloves of garlic
1/2 a yellow onion
a big pinch of salt
lime juice or vinegar
Add everything to a blender and blend until uniform.
Heat a saucepan over medium heat. Once it’s hot, add in a few tbsp of olive oil. Pour the salsa into the pan (it will spit and splatter a bit from the heat). Cook for a few min over medium heat and then turn down the heat slightly and allow it to cook until it’s slightly reduced and it takes on a more “cooked” flavor.
Taste and adjust as needed with salt and/or lime juice or vinegar.
You can also try out this Cherry Tomato Salsa from a previous newsletter issue.
