The variety of salsas adds spice to city life
Sheer variety in Houston’s quintessential condiment is spice of life
TRY to imagine Houston without salsa.
This city would be but a pale shadow of itself without our birthright Mexican condiment in all its manifold forms: the raw and the cooked; the red and the green; the gold and the blackened; the toasted and the charred; the chopped and the puréed; the fiery and the mild.
Salsas are nothing less than the spice of our civic life. They are there for us at the end of a trying day, an impossible week: poised to inject a thrilling dose of capsaicin into our systems, to make our palates come to attention and our flagging nervous systems come alive. Not only are these many-hued, invigorating elixirs therapeutic, they are redemptive as well. Even an average Mexican restaurant can be redeemed by a superior salsa, and who among us has not made a favorite out of a workaday neighborhood joint purely for the joy of scarfing its table salsa with as many tortilla chips as it is humanly possible to ingest? In fact, we would suggest that if you do not have two or three regular salsa fueling stations scoped out within, say, a three-mile radius of your home, you cannot truly call yourself a Houstonian. So we’re telling you about ours, with the caveat that salsas are, in the end, highly personal affairs.
How much chile heat, how much salt, whether to add cilantro or garlic, to roast or not to roast the raw ingredients, to toast the dried chiles or not: these are the myriad quirks each salsa lover must decide for her- or himself. Ask any home cook about his or her special salsa recipe and you’ll quickly find out how individualized our taste for these life-giving potions can be.
Houston’s salsa methodology and repertoire has evolved over the decades, too. In this age of electric blenders and food processors, few cooks take the trouble to achieve the kind of variegated textures that result from blending the raw or cooked ingredients with a traditional mortar and pestle.
Some of chef Hugo Ortega’s salsa recipes in his cookbook “Street Food of Mexico” (Bright Sky Press) call for very specific food-processor pulse counts to get the salsa consistency right. Houston’s Adán Medrano, author of the recently published “Truly Texas Mexican” (Texas Tech University Press), offers some salsa recipes made in the blender. But for an elemental salsa featuring his favorite serrano chiles, with their straightforward vegetal heat, he advises readers to put a sliced serrano pod into a molcajete along with 1⁄8 teaspoon of salt and ¼ cup of water, “and have fun!”
As recently as the 1970s, cilantro was not a widely used ingredient in Houston; the flowering of New Southwestern Cuisine, advanced by Houstonian Robert Del Grande, helped earn this distinctive, piercing herb the publicity that has helped make it nearly ubiquitous today in green salsas, enchiladas, pico de gallo and more.
Even green salsas were once much rarer than red versions, until restaurateur Ninfa Laurenzo introduced the city to her wildly popular, creamy green avocado salsa. From its advent at the original Ninfa’s restaurant on Navigation, the world of Houston salsa has been a binary system. Her tradition of putting a red and a green salsa on the table with a basket of chips lives on in many restaurants.
The chiles we use in our salsa have evolved, too. The mid-20th-century days of fresh jalapeño and serrano-gigged salsas, many of them tomatobased, have been supplanted by an era in which all kinds of dried red chiles are prized for the different levels of heat and earthy flavors they provide. Anchos, pasillas, guajillos and murderously hot little chiles de arbol now make our salsas sing, and the smoke-dried, ripe jalapeños known as chipotles are widely used.
Gabriela Santamaria, a server at Hugo’s restaurant, recalls a Houston where she pined for the habanero chile salsa she grew up with in the Yucatán — and her happiness when she finally found some, in 1988, at Merida restaurant. The fact that she had to ask for it did not lessen her pleasure. Today, the fierce fruity sear of the golden habanero pod is second nature here. At Sanatamaria’s place of employment the habanero salsa is a popular sidekick to Hugo’s lechon, pulled pork barbecued in a banana leaf.
Sunset orange, Hugo’s habanero salsa slaps you with its bright lightning, a highpitched heat that quickly moves across lips and tongue until it moves in to stay on the back of the palate. Thirty years ago, it might have been considered too extreme for most Houstonians’ comfort. Today, diners dab it onto a tangle of pork shreds folded into little blue-corn tortillas, to be strewn with raw onion and cilantro cut into the tiniest mince.
Each bite of the ad hoc taco seems to call for more and more of the salsa, until you’re finally spooning it on willy nilly and weeping the happy capsaicininduced tears that mean, as a Houstonian, you’re having a really good time.
That’s the enduring beauty of salsa in all its guises, and why we’ll keeping cherishing it. Salsa lets you know, in no uncertain terms, that you’re alive.