Salsa ratios

Three tomato salsas from the catalog show the spread. They sit nearest the lower quartile, the median and the upper quartile of the tomato to onion ratio, and every weight below is the amount the recipe itself declares.

Fresh salsa, salsa cruda, is raw ingredients chopped and combined: tomato, onion, chile, cilantro, lime. It stays bright and a little watery, and it is at its best the day it is made, while the vegetables are still crisp.

Cooked salsa, whether the ingredients are roasted, charred, or simmered, trades that raw crunch for depth. Cooking softens onion and garlic’s sharp edge, chars bring a smoky bitterness, and a simmer thickens the mixture and lets the flavors settle into each other.

Lime juice is the most common acid in the catalog's salsas, but acid is far from universal. 43 of 129 salsas use lemon or lime juice, and 81 use an acid of any kind, vinegar included. Among the weighed salsas that use citrus, the median is about 2 tablespoons per pound of tomato or tomatillo.

Acid brightens the whole mixture, and it slows browning on cut avocado when that is part of the mix. A salsa without enough acid tastes muddy no matter how good the vegetables are. Which acid to use, and when one can stand in for another, is covered in Lemon or vinegar.

Salt does more than season in a raw salsa. It draws moisture out of chopped tomato and onion through osmosis, which is part of why a fresh salsa gets watery if it sits salted for too long before serving. Salt it close to when you plan to eat it, and taste again after it has had a few minutes to pull that moisture out. The catalog's salsas that weigh their salt land at a median of 1.25 grams per 100 grams of tomato or tomatillo, about a teaspoon of fine salt per pound.

Chile is the one ingredient in salsa that varies most in strength from batch to batch, since heat differs from pepper to pepper even within the same variety. Most recipes treat chile as adjustable: start with less than you think you need, taste, and add more rather than committing a whole pepper up front.

Removing the seeds and the white pith inside a chile cuts a meaningful amount of heat without losing much flavor, since that is where most of the capsaicin concentrates. Leaving them in is an easy way to raise the heat of a recipe without changing anything else about it.

The catalog holds 129 salsa recipes. The average recipe lists 8.2 ingredients, and the typical recipe sits at 8. That is a modest count for a sauce category, in line with how salsa is meant to work: a handful of ingredients, each one doing a clear job, rather than a long list of things layered on top of each other.

Chop size affects the result as much as the ingredient list does. A fine, even dice spreads flavor through every bite and is standard for a table salsa meant to be scooped with a chip. A rougher, chunkier cut reads as more rustic and works better spooned over grilled meat or fish, where you want distinct bites of vegetable rather than a uniform mixture. For how far a batch goes at the table, see How much sauce per serving.