Who gets to wag the proverbial finger at what should or shouldn’t play a part in a Mexican person’s kitchen or gastronomical expressions? “Is cooking not an outlet for us to cultivate and bring our creativity to life with the resources we have at hand?” asks Ernesto Gonzalez, the documentarian behind the Instagram account Chakapatas , and purveyor of fresh nixtamal in Palmdale. Consider fruit in salsa, which in the U.S.
can be thought of as something bizarre, something that doesn’t quite belong in Mexican cuisine. But bizarre wasn’t the emotion I felt late one night when one of my cousins, during a trip visiting my family in León, Guanajuato, took me to a taco shop called La Mina de Oro . A little tower of all kinds of salsas peered at us on the table.
One of them was a chopped pineapple habanero salsa. I eagerly put some on my chistorra taco, starring a fatty and richly spiced sausage. The bright and heat-laden salsa cut right through.
Sweet and tart with spicy and savory. Fruit with salsa is something that just makes sense to my tastebuds. Perhaps I owe this to the way I grew up in San Diego seeing mango and pineapple used in ceviche.
It‘s a similar idea behind the mango salsa Alexa Soto included in her Mexican vegan cookbook “ Plantas ” — akin to a salsa bandera (pico de gallo) with the creamy addition of avocado. The tartness of fruit takes on a playful role that flirts with the citrus in a lot of salsas, dancing with its heat. It’s why the chile-l.