A basic pico de gallo salsa contains a few basic elements: a tomato, something spicy, an onion, and something acidic. This is wonderful for new cooks who don’t have much experience handling ingredients or knives. Pico de gallo ingredients must be chopped by hand and not in a food processor or blender, so a pico is a simple and safe way to get plenty of practice holding and using a good chef’s knife.
Every new chef needs to learn to trust and respect his or her knives; they can be extremely helpful if you know how to use them, but you can’t be reckless with or around them. Knives also cannot do the impossible; if you ask of a knife something it cannot do, you may get seriously hurt. Be careful. There’s no harm or shame in being careful. I hurt myself peeling potatoes Christmas Eve 2020, so now, with no shame whatsoever, I wear Kevlar gloves when I work with vegetable peelers. This is perfectly fine. There is no shame in doing anything to keep yourself safe. Speed and precision like the chefs on TV or the internet will come, but before that, you must be safe. Prioritize safety above all else.
Knife safety comes in three parts. First, a dull knife is unsafe, and a sharp knife is safe. Use a honing rod and/or a whetstone on your knives every few weeks or months, depending on how often you use them. Keep them sharp, and they will keep you safe. High-quality knives and high-quality steels and/or stones can literally last long enough to become family generational heirlooms. Second, how you hold the knife. At some point, you’ll notice the blade and the handle meet. With the index finger and thumb of your dominant hand, pinch the knife at the blade at that point, and curl your three remaining fingers behind them on the handle. Hold the knife firmly, but you don’t need a tense “death grip” on it either. Be in control but stay relaxed. Controlled and relaxed is safe, controlled and tense is unsafe. Finally, how you hold the food. Always hold whatever you are cutting with your non-dominant hand, and hold your food with your dominant hand. Use what I call a “three-layer claw grip” to hold the food. As with the knife, be firm but be relaxed. Raise your non-dominant hand like you see people doing when they get sworn into office. Now, curl your fingers down so each one looks like it only has its first knuckle (the biggest one, closest to where each finger joins with the hand) still pointing up. Put your hand in this position flat on a table with the back of your hand facing up. Your palm should touch your table. Raise your palm slightly so your fingernails go from completely touching your table’s surface to being perpendicular to it. You now have a claw grip. Furthest out in front is the middle finger, then the index and ring fingers, then the thumb and pinky. Keeping your fingers curled like this is the safest way to hold the food so it doesn’t move while you’re cutting, and the best way to keep your fingers away from the action of the knife.
Find a few tomatoes on the vine, wash them, and pull them off the vine. Using a sharp knife and this claw grip, cut each tomato through its stem end (straight down through where the vine was attached). Turn each half of the tomato cut-side down (we always want to cut things with flat surfaces; this is why we cut two hemispheres, not one sphere, as much as possible). Now, find the stem end in the middle and cut directly through it, creating a left half and a right half. Cut each half in half along its long side once more. Now, turn your board 90 degrees, and cut parallel to the “short” side of these segments of tomato three or four times, depending on the size of the tomato and your skill with the knife. Repeat this with all your tomatoes. Once this is done, your tomatoes have been diced. Set them aside.
Now, dice a red onion. Onions have two ends: one is fuzzy, and that end will be called the “root end” from now on. The other end has some strands of onion peel coming up in a mass together. That end will be the “stem end” from now on. Find the middle of the onion, cutting it in two from stem to root. You should have a left half and a right half with otherwise intact stem-halves and root-halves. Lay each half flat on your board, and cut the stem end off, but LEAVE THE ROOT END INTACT OR THIS METHOD WILL NOT WORK. Peel away all the onion paper and the first layer of the onion. Rotate this stemless, peeled half-onion so that the stemless side faces you and the root half is facing away from you. Carefully place your knife parallel to your cutting surface and make 2 or three cuts. The onion should still be together, but now the half should have a “top third,” a “middle third,” and a “bottom third.” Now, starting very close to the root BUT NOT GOING THROUGH IT, cut down the length of the onion. Make as many or as few cuts as you like. For salsa, I usually make six to eight of these cuts, but for sauces like my variation of Sauce Tomate, I have made as many as 14 of these cuts. Turn the board 90 degrees and start making cuts from the stem side all the way until just before the root. Stop as close to the root as possible to minimize waste. Once you have done this to all the halves of all of your onions, they are ready.
Every pico has some kind of pepper. For those of you who like heat, follow these instructions on a jalapeno or your pepper of choice. If you want the mildest possible pico, use a bell pepper, either red or green. Cut off the top to remove the stem but cut close to the stem to minimize waste. If you find you cut off too much, then cut around the stem to save the flesh you cut off too. Cut along the length of the pepper. You should now have two long halves of peppers that should have lots of seeds and pith inside. Remove those, unless you have a hotter pepper and you want to keep them in deliberately, knowing that the pith is where most of the capsaicin (the chemical that makes spicy peppers spicy) is stored. The peppers so the skin is on the cutting board, and now cut along the length of each half-pepper to make sticks. Cut parallel to those sticks to dice the pepper. The spicier the pepper, the finer your dice should be.
Use a Microplane grater to zest as many limes as you would like—as many as you think you need to balance the heat from the peppers and the pungency of the onion. Be careful to only remove the colored zest with the grater, not the white pith. The zest has several aromatic flavoring oils. The pith, on the other hand, is extremely bitter and unpleasant.
If you want to add anything else to your salsa (I’ve seen salsas that include peaches, mangoes, pineapples, and other fruits), now would be a good time to cut them. I can’t possibly guess all the additions every reader would try in their salsa, so I won’t give specific instructions on how to cut any of them. But I will reiterate this: the general principles of creating flat surfaces as quickly as possible, using the claw grip, and cutting one axis (x, y, z) at a time of the cubes that make up dice are always good guidelines.
Under-seasoning food is probably the most common mistake home cooks make. Use the learning experience of making salsa to correct this. Add some salt and freshly ground pepper. Taste the salsa. See if it needs more salt, pepper, or more acidity from the lime. Compensate as necessary. Learning to taste food as it is being prepared, then adjusting the rest of the preparation based on the results of a tasting is an essential skill most home cooks don’t have. Learning this skill will immediately massively improve the taste of the food the average home-cook puts out, and it will also increase the motivation to cook, the desire to try new ingredients, and the willingness to experiment and rely less and less on recipes and more and more on intuition.
Garnish your salsa with chopped fresh herbs. Cilantro is perhaps the most “traditionally Mexican” herb in this context, but I know there is a not-so-insignificant population with a genetic trait that means they perceive cilantro as having a “soapy” taste. If you fall into this category, run your knife through a bunch of parsley a few times. If you don’t, and you like cilantro, use it instead. Serve.
If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!
Every new chef needs to learn to trust and respect his or her knives; they can be extremely helpful if you know how to use them, but you can’t be reckless with or around them. Knives also cannot do the impossible; if you ask of a knife something it cannot do, you may get seriously hurt. Be careful. There’s no harm or shame in being careful. I hurt myself peeling potatoes Christmas Eve 2020, so now, with no shame whatsoever, I wear Kevlar gloves when I work with vegetable peelers. This is perfectly fine. There is no shame in doing anything to keep yourself safe. Speed and precision like the chefs on TV or the internet will come, but before that, you must be safe. Prioritize safety above all else.
Knife safety comes in three parts. First, a dull knife is unsafe, and a sharp knife is safe. Use a honing rod and/or a whetstone on your knives every few weeks or months, depending on how often you use them. Keep them sharp, and they will keep you safe. High-quality knives and high-quality steels and/or stones can literally last long enough to become family generational heirlooms. Second, how you hold the knife. At some point, you’ll notice the blade and the handle meet. With the index finger and thumb of your dominant hand, pinch the knife at the blade at that point, and curl your three remaining fingers behind them on the handle. Hold the knife firmly, but you don’t need a tense “death grip” on it either. Be in control but stay relaxed. Controlled and relaxed is safe, controlled and tense is unsafe. Finally, how you hold the food. Always hold whatever you are cutting with your non-dominant hand, and hold your food with your dominant hand. Use what I call a “three-layer claw grip” to hold the food. As with the knife, be firm but be relaxed. Raise your non-dominant hand like you see people doing when they get sworn into office. Now, curl your fingers down so each one looks like it only has its first knuckle (the biggest one, closest to where each finger joins with the hand) still pointing up. Put your hand in this position flat on a table with the back of your hand facing up. Your palm should touch your table. Raise your palm slightly so your fingernails go from completely touching your table’s surface to being perpendicular to it. You now have a claw grip. Furthest out in front is the middle finger, then the index and ring fingers, then the thumb and pinky. Keeping your fingers curled like this is the safest way to hold the food so it doesn’t move while you’re cutting, and the best way to keep your fingers away from the action of the knife.
Find a few tomatoes on the vine, wash them, and pull them off the vine. Using a sharp knife and this claw grip, cut each tomato through its stem end (straight down through where the vine was attached). Turn each half of the tomato cut-side down (we always want to cut things with flat surfaces; this is why we cut two hemispheres, not one sphere, as much as possible). Now, find the stem end in the middle and cut directly through it, creating a left half and a right half. Cut each half in half along its long side once more. Now, turn your board 90 degrees, and cut parallel to the “short” side of these segments of tomato three or four times, depending on the size of the tomato and your skill with the knife. Repeat this with all your tomatoes. Once this is done, your tomatoes have been diced. Set them aside.
Now, dice a red onion. Onions have two ends: one is fuzzy, and that end will be called the “root end” from now on. The other end has some strands of onion peel coming up in a mass together. That end will be the “stem end” from now on. Find the middle of the onion, cutting it in two from stem to root. You should have a left half and a right half with otherwise intact stem-halves and root-halves. Lay each half flat on your board, and cut the stem end off, but LEAVE THE ROOT END INTACT OR THIS METHOD WILL NOT WORK. Peel away all the onion paper and the first layer of the onion. Rotate this stemless, peeled half-onion so that the stemless side faces you and the root half is facing away from you. Carefully place your knife parallel to your cutting surface and make 2 or three cuts. The onion should still be together, but now the half should have a “top third,” a “middle third,” and a “bottom third.” Now, starting very close to the root BUT NOT GOING THROUGH IT, cut down the length of the onion. Make as many or as few cuts as you like. For salsa, I usually make six to eight of these cuts, but for sauces like my variation of Sauce Tomate, I have made as many as 14 of these cuts. Turn the board 90 degrees and start making cuts from the stem side all the way until just before the root. Stop as close to the root as possible to minimize waste. Once you have done this to all the halves of all of your onions, they are ready.
Every pico has some kind of pepper. For those of you who like heat, follow these instructions on a jalapeno or your pepper of choice. If you want the mildest possible pico, use a bell pepper, either red or green. Cut off the top to remove the stem but cut close to the stem to minimize waste. If you find you cut off too much, then cut around the stem to save the flesh you cut off too. Cut along the length of the pepper. You should now have two long halves of peppers that should have lots of seeds and pith inside. Remove those, unless you have a hotter pepper and you want to keep them in deliberately, knowing that the pith is where most of the capsaicin (the chemical that makes spicy peppers spicy) is stored. The peppers so the skin is on the cutting board, and now cut along the length of each half-pepper to make sticks. Cut parallel to those sticks to dice the pepper. The spicier the pepper, the finer your dice should be.
Use a Microplane grater to zest as many limes as you would like—as many as you think you need to balance the heat from the peppers and the pungency of the onion. Be careful to only remove the colored zest with the grater, not the white pith. The zest has several aromatic flavoring oils. The pith, on the other hand, is extremely bitter and unpleasant.
If you want to add anything else to your salsa (I’ve seen salsas that include peaches, mangoes, pineapples, and other fruits), now would be a good time to cut them. I can’t possibly guess all the additions every reader would try in their salsa, so I won’t give specific instructions on how to cut any of them. But I will reiterate this: the general principles of creating flat surfaces as quickly as possible, using the claw grip, and cutting one axis (x, y, z) at a time of the cubes that make up dice are always good guidelines.
Under-seasoning food is probably the most common mistake home cooks make. Use the learning experience of making salsa to correct this. Add some salt and freshly ground pepper. Taste the salsa. See if it needs more salt, pepper, or more acidity from the lime. Compensate as necessary. Learning to taste food as it is being prepared, then adjusting the rest of the preparation based on the results of a tasting is an essential skill most home cooks don’t have. Learning this skill will immediately massively improve the taste of the food the average home-cook puts out, and it will also increase the motivation to cook, the desire to try new ingredients, and the willingness to experiment and rely less and less on recipes and more and more on intuition.
Garnish your salsa with chopped fresh herbs. Cilantro is perhaps the most “traditionally Mexican” herb in this context, but I know there is a not-so-insignificant population with a genetic trait that means they perceive cilantro as having a “soapy” taste. If you fall into this category, run your knife through a bunch of parsley a few times. If you don’t, and you like cilantro, use it instead. Serve.
If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!
(Credit to Natasha's Kitchen)
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ReplyDeleteMexican Tacos and chilli are very popular here. Thanks for review.
ReplyDeleteMy mission with this blog is to help people learn the basics of great food-- glad this could help lay that groundwork in Mexican cuisine!
DeleteBest Sindhi Man
ReplyDelete