Who has the right to point the finger at what should or should not be part of the cuisine or gastronomic expressions of a Mexican?
“Isn’t cooking an outlet to cultivate and bring to life our creativity with the resources we have at hand?” asks Ernesto González, the documentary maker behind the Instagram account. Chapakatasand fresh nixtamal supplier in Palmdale.
Let's think about fruit in salsa, something that in the United States can be considered something strange, something that doesn't fit in Mexican cuisine.
Time 20 minutes
Yields 2 1/2 cups
But strange was not the emotion I felt late one night when one of my cousins, during a trip to visit my family in León, Guanajuato, took me to a taco shop called The Gold MineOn the table we saw a small tower of all kinds of sauces. One of them was a sauce made of chopped pineapple with habanero chili.
I happily added some to my chistorra taco, which featured a greasy, highly seasoned sausage. The bright, spicy sauce was a total standout. Sweet and tangy with a hint of heat and savory. Fruit with salsa is something that makes sense to my taste buds.
Maybe I owe this to the way I grew up in San Diego seeing mango and pineapple being used in ceviche. There is a similar idea behind the mango sauce Alexa Soto included in her Mexican vegan cookbook “Plantas” something similar to a flag sauce (pico de gallo) with the creamy addition of avocado.
The acidity of fruit takes on a playful role that flirts with citrus in many salsas, dancing with their spiciness. That’s why the chili-lime spice blend Tajín is sprinkled over watermelon. And it’s why chamoy paste, which gets its addictive flavor from pickled apricots, prunes, or other dried fruit, is drizzled over mango and works so well on most fresh-cut fruit, potato chips, and the rims of chilled michelada glasses. When dried fruit is generously coated with spice blends, our tongues rejoice—and even salivate—at the encounter of sweet, sour, and spicy.
It is not a new concept.
In fact, fruit is already part of the classic sauce mix, consisting of tomato, citrus, chili and allium. Not only citrus fruits are fruits, but also tomato, avocado and the main ingredient of sauce, chili. a lot, The Nahuatl word for sauce, which is often directly associated with mole (a sauce in itself), also uses fruit. While mole from the pre-Hispanic period has been adapted to post-colonial ingredients, many of them have been made for generations with dried fruits like raisins and prunes to create their rich, complex profiles.
Time 20 minutes
Yields 1 1/2 cups
They may not be the most common sauces you'll find, but as Gonzalez says, “fruit sauces have definitely earned their place in regional cuisine.”
In Charapan, Michoacán, where her aunts live, Gonzalez says they make salsas in molcajetes using manzana criolla, a local variety of apple, instead of tomatillo or alongside it. If tomatillos cry from acidity, so do these apples.
“These alternatives played an indispensable role during difficult times for many in communities when typical ingredients were scarce or when people needed their food supplies to last,” adds González about the role of fruits in sauces. “So for me, using fruits like apples, quinces or even tsïtuni [wild tart blackberries] “It demonstrates another brilliant example of the ingenuity of our communities’ cooks.”
In Sonora, salsa company The Mix makes a papaya and habanero salsa; in Tequila, Jalisco, salsa made from yellow plums is mashed in a molcajete to make tacos; and in Gonzalo Guzmán’s cookbook “Nopalito,” salsa borracha calls for apple juice.
Locally, one of my favorite taco shops in town, Tacos 1986, with a delicious mushroom taco for vegetarians like me (and mushroom lovers, too), has a mahogany-red strawberry salsa on the salsa bar.
Fruit in sauce is here.
Gonzalez notes that fruit salsas are just one of many foods that demonstrate an intrinsic and often overlooked element of what makes Mexican cuisine so alive: culinary creativity.
In my own kitchen, I’ve expanded my fruit salsa repertoire with a red cherry or plum pico de gallo, inspired by the stone fruit season, and a marinated strawberry anchovy salsa inspired by Tacos 1986 and Flamingo Estate’s limited-edition dried guajillo strawberries—a luxurious confection reminiscent of chili-coated Mexican dried fruit.
Its slow acidity traces an ongoing conversation about the famous love affair between sour and spicy in Mexican cuisine, one worth celebrating.
