Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the Salsa Cast. This is josh On Chuck on tomato, He's onion. Jerry's the chili here and you put us together, Chop us up, put us in a blender, squish us under your armpit, let us drip down the side of your chest, indo a bowl. Then you've got stuff you should know.
Just two guys trying to recapture the.
Match that's that's been irretrievably lost forever.
Anyway, Salsa, right, Yeah, people like to say salsa.
I'm glad somebody said that to get it out of the way. I feel like we would have gotten in trouble had we not actually said it.
Yeah, now we can just move on.
Yeah, let's move on because salsa, of course, what we're talking about is the stuff that comes in and jar at the grocery store that's loaded with high freakdase corn syrup that you put on to tortillas and shovel in your mouth, and just as Mexicans have done for thousands of years.
Yes, not always, if there's plenty out there that aren't loaded with highproot dust cornsrup, but you know a lot of the big jarred stuff that you find in a little silver caddy right beside the chips. Yes, a lot of that stuff is so.
Yeah, a lot of the stuff in the jark has gotten good in recent years. And you can actually thank the the I don't want to say cheap stuff, the more generic super American versions, yes, for laying the groundwork for those better versions to come.
Sure, but what we're doing is just talking about that that thing that you dip your chip in, that that we love, that had a that's still very popular, but that got very, very famous in the late eighties and nineties as sort of America's new favorite condiment, out selling Ketchup very famously in nineteen ninety one.
And then it overtook cats Up in nineteen ninety six.
That's right, and we're gonna talk all about salsa. This is a Dave Ruse joint, and Dave helped us out with this, and he found somebody I don't even know who this was. He just describes him as a Mexican college student who said, watch watching someone shovel salsa with a tortilla chip is strange to Mexicans, Like how an American would feel watching someone drink salad dressing out of
a bottle. I do take issue a little bit. I get the point, but I think that would be an appropriate thing to say if we were just eating it out of the jar, like shoveling it like directly like a drink into our mouth. You know what I mean?
I do. But the point this guy's making, and I was being a troll earlier when I was saying that it was authentic just like Mexicans, do you eating salsa with chips is thoroughly American? Yeah, And if you go to Mexico, they don't serve chips in salsa, because maybe a better analogy you would be like if you went to Mexico and they served well chips and ketchup. Okay, how about that. That's a very direct analogy.
Although I will say I have been to some super great, authentic places in Mexico City that would give you the house specialty salsa with the large handmade tostadas and you know they're handmade because they're all they're weird, irregularly shaped, and you know they put like five or six of those in a big wooden bowl and you can kind of break those apart and eat them with your salsa. I've seen that plenty of times.
Yes, had you looked around at that restaurant in Mexico City, you would have noticed that you were the only one who was served that, and it was because you were wearing your American flag tank top.
Not true, my friend, it's on the menu.
Mexico City is pretty great.
Huh, it's the best.
I think we talked about it recently, right.
Yeah, we talked about it when I got home, and then since I went on that trip, you went on a trip, and you had already been there before anyway, But yeah, we got to you know, Reminisce a bit together.
I remember it was the brutalism episode that we talked about my trip too. Yeah, probably that was great anyway. Yes, Mexico City's wonderful. If you can make it down there or over there up there, you should.
But should we talk about the origins of salsa?
Yeah, because again, let's just spell this out. Salsa in Mexico is a condiment.
Okay, Okay, I think that's pretty clear.
I just wanted to make sure. Yes, let's go on to the origins.
That is the stuff you should know.
Way though, we overstating something five times.
Just to get out the hammer, beat people over the head with it.
I feel like that's the josh from stuff you shoul in no way at least Well.
People are busy when they're listening, so you never know. It might take that third or fourth mention. They'd be like, Wow, I was washing dishes and I didn't even hear until that last one.
Thanks Chuck. That's very supportive of you. I was thinking, you know something we could do, yeah, is if we wanted to make sure that somebody got the point we're trying to make, to make sure they're paying attention, we could just say something like beep right, and then insert the fact that we're trying to get across so they'll really pay attention.
Yeah, that's a good point. So if you want to go back to the origins of salsa, you would have to go back thousands of years in meso America, because in Central and South America they really loved to grow chilies and tomatoes, and you put chilies and tomatoes together, you're gonna have some kind of a salsa.
Yeah. I mean, that's essentially the basic ingredients for salca. You could make those. You can make a salsa with just those two things.
Really could, and people do.
Some people do, Yeah, although over the years people have added to it more and more. But yeah, as far back as about nine ten thousand years ago, people were making something similar to salsa like we would recognize it as salsa today, and it just kept getting more and more and more advanced and more expansive. Right at a few thousand years of tinkering, something's going to get a little more advanced, and sauce is no different.
Yeah, for sure. The first person that we found that has kind of written about this was a Franciscan priest named Bernardino D. Sagan. I have no idea how to pronounce it. Sahagan, Sahagan s a h g u n. There was a record He wrote a lot about the Aztec culture, and specifically in his Florentine codex, wrote about a sauce in a food market, or different kinds of sauces in a food market. To Nochi Slane, it's probably not right either, but I'll just read through some of
this as a quote. Hot sauces, sauces with juices, shredded food, with chili, with squash, seeds, with tomatoes, with smoked chili with hot chili, with yellow chili with mild red chili sauce, yellow chili sauce, hot chili sauce, bird excrement sauce, sauce of smoked chili, heated sauces, bean sauce, toasted beans, cooked beans,
mushroom sauce. You get the idea O going. You have to find Oh, okay, why not sauce of small squash, sauce of large tomatoes, sauce of ordinary tomatoes, sauce of various kinds of sour herbs, avocado sauce, end quote.
Shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo.
That's exact sandwich what I was thinking.
That's about that.
Yeah, so he's talking about sausa there.
Yeah, yeah, very clearly. And again this stuff had been around for thousands of years, and they were just selling it like it was nothing. Because it was nothing because in Mexico, salsa is a condiment.
That's right, traditionally prepared in the Aztecs. And still you'll see these today, and in fact, I have one in my kitchen. I think you do too, right.
Yeah, I also have a masa maker that you got me as well.
Oh that's right. A moca heete is a lava rock mortar and pestle. They're very very heavy. If you get like a real deal one. I can recommend this as a gift like a housewarming gift to someone, apartment warming gift, Like you can spend like fifty to seventy bucks on like a really really nice, heavy duty, real deal mocha hete.
And it's a great gift for someone because when you pull this thing out at a dinner party and you're grinding the either salsa together table side or if you're making some guacamole table side, it's a really kind of fancy, fun thing to do. Not fancy but fun.
It really warms whatever structure you're trying to warm.
Agreed.
So the chili so tomato, we need to make sure everybody knows that tomato is indigenous to Mesoamerica, right, I think you kind of intimato that earlier.
Correct.
Same with Chili's and when the Colombian exchange began. Specifically, when Christopher Columbus tried Chili's for the first time, he compared them to black pepper because that was probably the spiciest thing you'd ever tasted in his life, and in Spanish, you call that pimento, And so that's why in English we call chili's peppers. But really chili is a noatla word. I think cheese chili. Yeah, and then they switched the eye to an e and here we go. Yeah.
I mean, I've never heard the word pepper said by people from Mexico. Maybe they do, but I've always just heard them called chilies. Sure, because you know, Christopher Columbus got it wrong, got it other thing wrong.
That's crazy. Who'd have thought.
The word sasa was already a word in Spanish. It was a generic word for sauce. And I think it was a Spanish priest in a dictionary published in fifteen seventy one that actually put that in the dictionary in Aztec style tomade a chili condiment listed as sasa in that sixteenth century dictionary.
Case closed. I think that's taking a break time if you ask.
Me, oh, sure, let's do it.
You want to it?
Okay.
So it's not like salsa was an immediate hit over in Europe. First of all, Christopher Columbus had misdirected everybody, and they thought it was basically like black pepper. The chilis I should say were. But the bigger problem was that people in Europe, and I swear we've talked about this before, people in Europe initially thought tomatoes were a deadly part of the night shade family. Yeah, you did
not want to eat a tomato. It was toxic, at the very least potentially deadly combined with something that was kind of like black pepper. Why would you ever want to eat something like that? But slowly, but surely, about almost seventeen hundreds, a guy named Antonio Latini became the first person to write down a recipe for what you would recognize as salsa, even though he called it Spanish style tomato sauce.
Yeah, I guess he was Italian, and so they were just liking it too, like regular tomato sauce.
Maybe, I think so, because the basis of it is pretty much tomatoes, but it has everything else, like you would want chili, peppers, onions, thyme, which is I guess the traditional ingredient found outside of Mexico for salsa.
Yeah, but combining the hot chilies with the tomato, I think you also threw in their salt, oil and vinegar. And at the very end of this recipe, little gross that says it is a very tasty sauce, both for boiled dishes or anything else. Boiled dishes, boiled bacon.
Oh God, do you remember that Better Off Dead?
Uh? No, I don't remember that.
His mom boiled boiled the mom and a Jonky's X mom boiled everything. And at one point she's serving bacon and it's boiled in like this kind of weird light green whitish colors. It's really good. Pot.
I remember her making a that was a weird part of that movie that everything she made was strange.
French fries.
Yeah, that's good stuff. So the other way that the Coleman Exchange worked, obviously, was things in Europe were introduced to the New World and all of a sudden, things like onion would come along or although they did have wild onion is indigenous to North America, but garlic cilantro, believe it or not, not indigenous to North America, coomen nuts, all these kind of unique vegetable oils and animal fats that comes Mexico's way, and they're like, oh, we know
just how to use this, so thank you for introducing us to it.
Yeah, it was weird. If you look around the Internet, you'll see that some people claim that animal fats and vegetable oils are not indigenous to Mesoamerica. And of course they are, because there's animals walking around that have fat, and there's vegetables there that have fat. Yeah, but apparently they did not make great use of this stuff, Like they didn't use fats very often. They usually charred stuff
or grilled it or boiled it. They and then they would add like salsa fat free salsa as like the condiment to it. But yeah, I found that kind of mind blowing because if you saw them, think about it, there's a lot of Mexican food, like actual authentic Mexican food that does isn't fatty at all. It's just kind of charred with a sauce. Yeah, that has no fat too. It's interesting. I just never thought about that.
Yeah, and you said a key thing there too, which we should mention, which is fat free. That's one of the reasons sausa became so big in the eighties and nineties because that was during the golden age of everything must be fat free. So salsa was like, you know, it wasn't some some some fatty condiment. There were no fatty condiments really or were there now that I'm thinking about.
It, chunky style, fatty continent?
Oh god, So now we're to talk about a couple of other sauces and that sounds like something from like a future movie or something.
Remember like the beer that just it's white, It's just all white. Can it just says beer in like a thick black font.
Oh yeah, they had that in La on my first visit years ago.
Yeah, you got me a can of it?
Did I really?
Did I send you a can of it? Yeah? So that's exactly what that label would look like.
You're exactly right. Generic. We're gonna talk about a couple of things now that are close to salsa but not and that is moley and hot sauce. We're not gonna spend too much time on this because I think most people kind of know the difference, but the line can kind of be blurred. I would say the main difference in Molay is that Molay is it's it's basically always puades. It's not gonna be it's never gonna be chunky. Kind
of the same with hot sauce. But Molay also usually has like I mean, if you got a good mole going you're talking fifteen twenty up to thirty or more ingredients. That's kind of what makes molay a mole.
Yeah, so you have a really sophisticated layered tastes with molay that can be like, it can be tangy. It can also be kind of like weirdly raisin a or mushroomy or something like that. It's it's different. But as far as a person walking around Mexico's concern, that'd be like comparing ketchup to gravy. They're just different. Yes, they both go on your food, but in different ways, in different contexts and different amounts, And gravy is probably not even a good example, but it's the best I can
come up with. But salsa means sauce, but molay is sauce because, as everyone who's listened to this episode up to this point knows, salsa is a condiment, not a sauce.
Yeah, so you would add it to the top of a taco or a toastata, whereas the mole it would be like you know, chicken moley. It typically has like the chicken completely drenched in the sauce when it hits the table.
Right like the very famous joke in Mexico you want some chicken with that mole ad, But then they say that in Spanish.
And the other thing is hot sauce. Of course, also different hot sauce meant to be, although there were some super hot sauces. Hot sauce is generally only hot and meant to be, you know, dabbed on a few drops at a time, and also not chunky, and also usually has vinegar, which you're not going to find in a lot of salsa.
No, not at all. And apparently hot sauce itself is It traces itself back to Massachusetts the very beginning of the nineteenth century. That was where it came from, but it got pretty popular south of the border as well, because it does involve chilies in some form or fashion. Usually it's chili, vinegar and salt are the three ingredients. Yes, and there's some good stuff out there, but yeah, it's not really salsa, although as we'll see, is it chips and salsa.
Time we're gonna have some.
I would love some. After researching all this, which, by the way, hat tip to Dave big thanks for helping us out with this one.
Big hat tip. Now I say we hold off on the chips and salsa. That was surprising because we have to go we have to I mean, chips and sauce is an American thing, like he said, So we got to go back to kind of when this hit the States in a big way. And anyone who knows the history of North America knows that a lot of the United States used to be Mexican territory. Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah,
and Nevada, California. A lot of Colorado was Mexico. But once that was no longer Mexico, there were still a lot of people living there, Mexican communities, Mexican culture, Mexican foods, and so it should come as no surprise that Texas and California and New Mexico and Arizona and places like that have always had and still continue to have a thriving Mexican food scene there. And this was true back in the nineteen twenties and thirties when salsa kind of came on the scene.
Yeah, and so the collision between often Anglo or other kind of European settlers in this area colliding with former Spanish settlers and indigenous people in the area. They kind of came together to form like kind of a hybrid
between Mexican and what would be American cuisine. So things like tex mex or Calimes or Southwest mex was born, which is was originally at least authentic Mexican dishes, but kind of toned down a little bit, made a little blander, made a little more Yorkshire putting it, you know what I mean?
Yeah, not as hot, made for the American palette. I think Dave dug up this recipe from nineteen thirty four in the La Times for chili salsa. The name of the article was Delicacies from Mexico. And even though it said in the article the salsa has used in many Spanish dishes, I think it was just a time when they were like Mexico Spain was the difference, right when in back much there's a pretty big difference, including an ocean in between them.
Yeah. And also the recipe included parsley and flour. Yeah, you just don't see that in many salsa dishes, So it was kind of text MESI for sure. I think even before text mex really was a thing. But going back to salsa and the idea that salsa, I think I said, the good stuff in jars today was built on the shoulders of the less good stuff of yesteryear. You can kind of trace that. No shade also, by the way, I hope I'm not coming off that way.
I'm not throwing shade at anybody like David Pace, who innovated and really kind of introduced America to salsa, but at the same time made it more palatable to his market. He took salsa and took it from a condiment which it is in Mexico and made it into kind of like a snack or an appetizer. So a dip, I guess is a better way to put it. Yeah.
David Paste was a Louisiana guy, born and raised. His family was in the molasses business, bottling molasses, so he had a background and bottling and jarring a food product. Went to World War Two, settled down in San Antonio, Texas eventually where the Mexican food scene is, and was in his robust You've been there, right, You've talked about the food there with me, I believe privately.
Yeah, oh yeah, definitely, it's good stuff.
Never been there, I gotta do it. But he loved that chili salsa that he would get locally at different Mexican restaurants, and he, like you said, he settled down the taste a little bit made of his own, his own variety called paste pecante. Pecante is an adjective meaning spicy or pungent. If you notice, if you look at the jar, it didn't say sauce on there, Nope, it
says pecante sauce. And the tomato was the star that Chile took a little bit of the back seat, and he had a goal to be what he said was the hinds of salsa. And although he did well, it would be his son in law, Kit Goldsbury, who would really kind of kick that brand to the next level.
Yeah, I mean think that's pretty ambitious. I want to be the hinds of salsa. And it actually turned out that way, but just yeah, not under his watch. He retired and Kit took over, think about the late seventies, sometime in the seventies, and at that same time there was a health craze going through America that translated, like I think you said earlier by the eighties into everything has to be fat free yea, And salsa again is basically by definition fat free. So it was ready made
to step up and kind of take the spotlight. And the Pace was very lucky that Kit Goldsberry was in charge because he, I guess knew a great opportunity. We saw it and just pushed Pace into the mainstream through a really clever, earwormy kind of advertising campaign that people still say today. You make me say it sometimes when you say New York City, I mean you stopped and been like you're not gonna say it. And that's from like the like nineteen eighty nine was when that first ad came out.
Yeah, that's right, And in nineteen ninety three we got the famous line, get a rope. You go look this thing up on YouTube. This ad ran for ten years from ninety three to two thousand and three. When they are one of the Camp Cowboy camp guys is chastising Cookie the cook because he's using salsa from New York City and they all go New York City and an actor named Ralph Bonzo bear Stedman uttered those famous three words get a rope even though Dave, did you notice
he put get the rope in here? I did get the rope. I got so mad at Dave.
Did you send him an email.
No, but he's listening, So I just wanted to tell him this way geez. But yeah, Ralph Bonzobar Steedman was just want to shout him out because it's an iconic commercial mine that's kind of up there with where's the beef? And he's a guy, here's a beef? Oh she passed away to no.
Instead of where's the beef? Well, abe, where's the beef?
Where's a beef?
Quote?
I love it, Sorry, Dave, but Ralph was from the Pacific Northwest, seemed like a really good guy, did lots of local acting and voice acting, and he passed away in twenty fourteen and left a very sweet family behind. So big shout out to Bonzo Bear.
So yeah, So this this ad campaign New York City, it just it came at a perfect time. The product was perfect. Not only were people trying to get more fat free and salsa was a great, great alternative to everything else like ketchup and stuff. People were also like trying new tastes, exotic ethnic tastes like Mexican salsa. Chunky style was just really you were really sophisticated if you
ate salta not ketchup. At a time in like the late eighties, so it really it just everything just came together and so all of a sudden, America just falls in love with salsa and still today. Like even in hindsight, I know this sounds kind of unnecessarily hysterical, but I can't believe that salsa ever outsold ketchup. It's mind boggling to me, like that it was that popular, and it stayed pretty popular, and like I was saying, it just
kept getting better and better and better to wear. The stuff that you buy in jars at the grocery store today is often pretty good, really good.
Yeah, And chances are your local grocery store even have like a like a housemade version that they sell in in like the little plastic containers. It has a you know, a cell by date on it, that kind of thing. Sure you usually see of those. My favorites are the well we'll save that, but again, chips and sauces is a pretty American thing. They do have the toastata in Mexico, but a toastata is used to sort of like an open face taco to put stuff on top of and
then you'll put your sauce on top of that. But we do have a few competing origin stories for the origin of tortilla chips, which is pretty fun, I think.
Yeah. As told in the Stuff You Should Know Book, The Incomplete Compendium, we talk about the invention of Fredo's, specifically by a guy named Elmer Doolan. Wonder where or remember when we talked about freedo feet get Friedo smell on their feet? That chapter features an illustration of Momo wearing a long haircut.
That's right. If you don't ever book, you should get it just to see Momo in there. It's a good illustration too.
It is. It's great. And as a matter of fact, we're not even going to tell you that story. You have to go read it in the book.
That's Oh you want to do that? Yeah, all right, you want to hear about Elmer Dulan. Go drop. You'll probably get that thing for like six bucks. Now, go to your library even yeah, get it for free. Go crack a book. All right. Let's move on to story number two, then, Josh Chick. That Rebecca Webb Caranza. She's married to Anny Mario and they own the El Zarapa Tortilla factory in La in the nineteen forties and they
made corn tortillas kind of straight up. But when they had a misshape and tortillas that they couldn't you know, that didn't look like the rest, they couldn't sell those, or thought they couldn't, And they would cut them into triangles and fry them up and sell them as torch chips. And apparently it was a pretty big seller in the nineteen forties and fifties regionally and then then eventually I think nationwide even.
Yeah, I mean, imagine like you had tortilla chips that you could buy in the forties. Of course you'd be crazy for that. Like there wasn't a lot of competition at the time, you know what I mean, snack wise.
Yeah, And I think this number three, though, is probably the leading Canada though. Don't you think it's gotta be?
Because number one he predates everybody by a few decades exactly. And number two he was known as the Corn King of San Antonio. His name was jose Bartolome Martinez. He looked like a well Hispanic Teddy.
Roosevelt, Okay, he kind of does.
And he was called the Corn King for nothing. He set up the first industrial scale mill for grinding corn in the United States, and he apparently had four different mills around San Antonio at one point and was pumping out sixty thousand pounds of tortilla chips a day all the way back in the nineteen teens.
That's amazing.
He probably was the guy who created the tortilla chip.
Yeah, I think so. And you know, it's a possible to find out, like, hey, what was the first restaurant that started just throwing that stuff on the table kind of for free, although it's not for freed usually anymore. Usually you get like a you can get like the chips with a trio of salsas and like a cheese
dip for you know, seven or eight bucks. But there are probably still some places that, you know, maybe some of the chains throw it on the table for free, like like Olive Garden does with that bread and salad.
Yeah, a lot of people think that it's kind of sacrilegious to start charging for it, even if you're upgrading the salsa. It's just it's a tradition that should be honored. And restaurants are like that actually costs us a lot of money. Yeah, people say I care not.
I mean, even if you pay something, they're gonna keep giving you basket refills of chips.
I guess it just feels off paying for chips and salsa. I'm fine with paying for queso, paying for guacamole, yeah yeah. And if they are like we have like a higher end salsa that we're not going to give you for free, paying for that, that's fine. But there should be some basic level salsa with chips at a Mexican restaurant in the United States that's complimentary, even work it into your price structure, but don't charge for it. There's something just off about it, I think.
So like a fancy saucea like made with gold schlager that would cost.
Right, they set it on fire table.
Side, all right, to each their own.
Nice Okay, but one more thing before we move on. You said it was impossible to trace where the first restaurant that started serving chips and salsa came from, and that seems to be true, but there was an historian on Reddit there ask Historians Subreddit. Somebody asked, like, what the first restaurant was that started serving chips and salsa,
and this historian dug up something kind of close. It's potentially a chain called Machao or El Nido, the parent They apparently were owned by the same person in Phoenix that by the early to mid seventies was already serving chips and then transferred over from hot sauce people used to put hot sauce on their chips to salsa, serving salsa with chips, so it's possible that was the first
restaurant to do it. But was even more interesting is that apparently before then people put hot sauce on their chips, much like that analogy I was talking about earlier, of putting ketchup on your chips. It's not that far off.
I love that you said that was much more interesting than the the reddit historian.
Well no, the Reddit historian found all that, so kudos to them.
Yeah, yeah, I gotcha. All right, So let's should we just go over a few sauces here, or should we take a break and do that.
I think we should take a break and come back and tell people how to make their own.
All right, we'll be right back and we're going to tell you how to get that mocha hette out and get busy right after this. All right, The first sausa we should talk about is just the classic. It's my favorite kind of sasa. Overall the Picota gayo. I love a salsa that's almost nothing but chunks, which is basically what picota guyo is.
Extremely fresh.
Yeah, not a lot of saucy tomato in there, even just you know, diced up tomato, onion, chilis, cilantro, lime juice, a little bit of salt, ban bang boom. I throw a little black pepper on top. That's just me.
Oh, Christopher Columbus would be proud, you sure would.
He was, like, see, but I really love just a good standard. I love a lot of kinds of sauces, but I love a standard pikota geyo for especially, uh well, for both for eating with chips and with just putting on tacos and stuff.
You know something I learned from researching this episode. I just had never occurred to me to ask, but pico de gayo actually means bek of the rooster or rooster's beak. Did you know that? Uh?
I didn't know that.
I always just thought it was meant gyo. It never occurred to me because gyo, you know, that's like a kind of beer and Guatemala and yeah, that's right.
All right, that's what I'm thinking of. Because it's got a rooster on the bottle.
Yeah, so they called it Beka the rooster apparently because people used to eat pico de gayo with their their index finger, middle finger, and thumb. They would just scoop it into their mouths like and that resembles kind of a chicken or a rooster beak diving into that bowld piko de gyo, infecting it with all manner of communicable diseases for the next person to take too, which is actually kind of a problem with the fresh salceas.
Yeah, I mean, you know, anytime it's a fresh, fresh produce like that, there could be the danger of some sort of salmonilla or something. But lime juice will kill that away, you hope. Can we talk about Chipotle?
Well, real quick, have you had this salsa schnea peck?
I have not.
I haven't either, but it sounds good. It's basically picoda gaya with some stuff swapped out with. The thing I find most interesting is rather than lime juice, sour orange juice. I'll bet that's good stuff, man, I bet it is. Okay, Yeah, let's go on to Chipotle.
Yes, Chipotles are smoky, they're a little tang here. A lot of this stuff is usually roasted tomatoes, garlic, onion, those chipotles. You roast those things up, get a little little fire char on them, and then grind them or blend them into a paste, and you got a pretty good chipotle working.
Then there's severe Day, which is made from tomatillos, which have a green cast to them. They're like little tiny green tomatoes, but tastes much better. I'm not sure what's going on with to Maatio's, but they're pretty awesome. And
that one's just pretty straight up. Like you, you kind of want the toe matillo to stand out taste wise, but it can also be kind of hot, scarlicky ONIONI there's some cilantro and all that, But the point is that to maatillos are really it's a really toe matillo forward salce.
It's green.
Sure, that's why they call it Salsaveri day. Yeah, but I have to say, I just have to shout this out. If you want a good jarred salsavere day, you could do a lot worse than Trader Jos.
I don't know that I've ever had a jarred salsavere day.
Actually, it's really good and it's it's actually hard to find a good one. I think Matao's makes a good salsaveride in the jar that you can get nationally, and Trader Joe's is your best bet for sure.
Do they ever do they get rid of the whole Trader Jose thing?
I don't know. I haven't looked closely, but I have seen that fairly recently. But maybe it was an out of date product that I bought.
Yeah, I don't go to Trader Jones. I did when I lived in La because it was convenient, but I haven't been in years. Salsa macha is something that I was introduced to on my Mexico city trip that i'd never had before. My good friend PJ, who is an outstanding cook and especially outstanding Mexican chef. His parents owned a Mexican restaurant, legendary Mexican restaurant New Jersey for decades that recently closed, but Mexican Food Factory shout them out nice.
I guarantee you there's some listeners that have been there. But PJ was like, you got to have the salsa macha you just you won't believe it, and just just try it.
It sounds awesome.
It's great. It's not like a traditional sauce that you'd see. It's like an oil so you've got your your dried chilis, of course, but you also have like ground peanuts, garlic, sesame, seeds of oil and vinegar, so no tomato in this guy. It's really really great. I'm surprised you didn't run across it in Mexico City, but next time you have the opportunity, I urge you to try it.
I will. It sounds really awesome, for sure. And that one comes from Vera Cruz, which also gave us pescato Vera Cruz, which is the best way to have a fish.
Yeah. I thought it was hawking for some reason, but I guess I got bad information.
That's all right, as long as you enjoyed it.
Yeah, and I love all I mean, that's the wonderful thing about going to.
Well.
I mean now in the United States, Mexican restaurants have gotten so varied. Now you can find, especially in the last decade, so many more options. Besides like tex Mechs in Mexicali, which I still love that sort of americanized version, but you can find some great authentic places and well hawking places and places that are more seafood forward, and it's just they're really representing all the flavors of Mexico here in the States now. And it's not a bad thing.
No, it's not at all. It's a great thing. As matter fact. You don't ever have to leave the US. Everybody just comes to us.
Do you want to go where some of these other non Mexican versions.
Yeah, the one that suck out to me was a hey, creolo, crelo creolo. That's right. It's like creole sauce. And in Peru they make it with like sour cream or mayo, some garlic and then Ahi peppers which are orange, and it sounds really good. But there's also a confusing Ecuadorian version that is not like that at all.
Yeah, that one has. Yeah, it's got the same exact name, so it is very confusing. It's got the same chili's, the ihi i guess aji chilies, but they don't have dairy products. It's not creamy. They use vinegar instead.
Yes, which is pretty much the antithesis of a creamy dairy product.
Vinegar is yeah, and Dave said it's pretty ubiq. It's just like ketchup on the table.
Yeah, because it's a condiment.
He also threw in Chimmy Chury in here from Uruguay slash Argentina. I don't know. I don't know if Chimmy chury belongs anywhere near this list. It just seems like such its own thing.
Well, there's not a single pepper or onion in it. I don't think or pepper, tomato, yeah, is there there's I don't think there's peppers in Chimmy chury. Is there? I think it's all like parsley and garlic, cilantro, garlic, a lot of oil. I don't think there's peppers. It's good, but I don't think it's salsa.
I agree. Should we just got this part out?
No, we need to leave it in as a lesson to everybody never to call chimmy churry salsa or else. I have to answer to us.
Well, Dave put it in there, so you know what I have to say Todave is get the rope.
Where's the beef?
David?
There was one other thing I wanted to mention to Oh. It was a shout out the greatest free table side salsa in any restaurant in the United States is to be found at a chain in Atlanta called Lafondah. They're doing something to their salsa that is unparallel. It's the most sophisticated free salsa you've ever seen, and it's not small batch. They have little bats of it sitting around
in the restaurant waiting to be served. But it is so good it's worth traveling to Atlanta just to try that salsa, which gives it a Michelin Star two in my opinion.
Well, you'll be glad to know that. Then, my friend, there is a Lafonda that opened up right down the street for me. All right, let's do dinner last year. And if you go to the East Lake Lafonda, everyone, I can encourage you to go across the street on Second Avenue. If you go walk by the other restaurants here, mixed up burgers, you will see the East Lake Garden. And that is a community garden that Emily and I run.
Emily runs that thing. If you go there and it looks beautiful and there are all kinds of herbs planted and flowers and stuff planted in beds. That is Emily's hard work, because she's basically a full time gardener.
Now that's awesome, man, What a great way to spend time.
Yeah, and the Eastlake Garden is just open for the public to use and enjoy after you've had some Lafonda. And she just recently put up a new Instagram page for the garden, so if you want to didn't have a lot on there yet, but it's you know, if you want to follow the story, you can go to east Underscore Lake Underscore Garden and check it out.
Yeah, he just gets stuffed on Lafonda and walk around the community gardens in East Lake. That sounds that's right, pleasant evening man. Yeah, all right, so yeah, we'll do that and I can finally give you your birthday present from like six months ago.
Great. Oh, and you'll not it's the Eastlake Garden because there's a sign this says east Lake Garden and painted by local legend artists our land.
Is that the one with the praying hands.
Yeah, and the cat the praying hands and lost cat and uh pray for Atlanta when during COVID. So Ronnie's a very long time Atlanta resident and very popular local artist. And we've commission Ronnie to do lots of things, including the sign for the East like garden in his unique amazing style.
And this is this has been hot Lanta talk.
Josh shot, Yeah, that's it for salsa. Go out and eat salsa every day.
Yes, go eat salsa, Go learn how to make molais, and just enjoy life. How about that? Yes, Chuck said, yes, that means it's listener mail time. I tricked him into it.
This is a good one. This is from Tamra, and Tamara included a post script pronunciation, I'm looking at real quick. Okay, got it? Hey, guys. Listening to the Widowhood episode reminded me of one of my favor stories about my great grandmother, Judida. When my grandmother was little nineteen thirty Pennsylvania, her father supported the family as a coal miner, and her mother, Judida, stayed at home raising six children. She was an immigrant
from Italy didn't speak a word of English. My great grandfather was in a mining accident and sent to a hospital hours away with an injury he could not recover from keeping him bedridden. You mentioned that children of widows were considered orphans. Well, brother, I'm here to tell you so were children of those whose fathers were in the hospital. Even Wow, there was at an actual court hearing for the children, where presumably they would be sent into the
foster system. My great grandmother got a lawyer. No idea how that happened, but the judge was entering the courtroom, my great grandmother was holding a conversation in Italian with her lawyer that went something like this, are they going to take my children? Yes, it's very likely, and it will cost the money to feed, house and clothe my children. Right, Yes, that's right. Then why don't they give me the money
and I'll take care of my own children. Just so happened that judge was fluent and Italian, understood the please and logic of my great grandmother, and that's exactly the arrangement they came to.
Awesome.
My grandmother recalls that her oldest brother was in charge of accounting for all the money they received from the state, documenting exactly how it was spent. They were lucky that was a little bit left over at the end of the month. They got some penny candy. And whenever I think life of is rough, I recalled Judida, and knowing that her blood is in me and seeing the strong line of women I come from, gives me the confidence I need to tackle whatever comes my way.
Very nice, what a great email.
Great email that's from Tama, and she was thrilled to know that she would be on and everyone will be happy to know that her grandmother is still alive at ninety seven years old and is going to hear this email.
So hello Grandma, Hello Grandma, and thanks a lot, Tamara. If you want to be like Tamara and send us an awesome email, we're always up for that, all you have to do is send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot Calm. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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