5 Reasons why salsa is good for you

A very good international chef that no one knows outside Puebla once told me: “you’d be surprised to know how many taco places are successful just because they make pretty good salsa, I rate taco shops according to their salsa.”

That’s to say that salsa is a pretty serious business in Mexican cuisine. Everybody knows that, but not many people can describe what a good salsa is supposed to taste like. But to be fair, it’s not as simple as it sounds.

For one, there’s the spiciness, something for which a regular chilli eater is actually not a good reference for gauging how hot a sauce is. Irene for example, –native from Chiapas (south Mexican border) and the person who taught me how to make a basic spicy tomato-, can’t tell anymore whether there’s black pepper or not in a dish; she’s been eating serrano chilli as if they were pickles for years, and now she is numb to anything less spicy than 4,000 Scoville units. And just to give you an idea, paprika is something around 500 Scoville while police tear gas ranges at minimum of 500,000 units. So that’s the first cultural part to eating chilli, and eating salsa is a strong cultural expression, one that can turn the experience into either a pleasure or a slow torture.

▲ Serrano Chilli & pickles

What is a salsa? People hear this in Taiwan and immediately think of Latin dance and when they do it, they also think about it with an English accent. So, what is salsa? The answer is very simple, salsa is the Spanish word for sauce. That’s very broad and it covers all the range rom “salsa de soya” (soy sauce) to “salsa boloñesa” (Bolognese sauce). The main difference appears when you use the word in English, because then everybody knows that you’re talking about Mexican sauce… or the Afro-Cuban dance style.

That’s where the confusion starts, because people will also think about salsa as being necessarily hot or spicy, which is not always the case; and the same goes for the dance, people think salsa is always sexy or hot, but yet again it’s a very broad generic term to refer to a dance style, just like KungFu is for martial arts. But don’t be confused by all this, salsa is still best when spicy and used to refer to hot salsa, just like the dance. That being said, here are five reasons why you should eat salsa, let’s dance!

1. Eating spicy will make you less prone to starvation.

Before refrigeration there was other more troublesome ways to keep food longer, like salt-curing, smoking or pickling. But there’s other problems when you think that cats and dogs still love beef jerky, or ham. I haven’t tried feeding pickles to a cat, but I’m sure that they don’t like spicy. So, if you’re in an apocalyptic scenario and have to choose between one of the formerly mentioned methods to preserve your game, using chilli will give you an evolutive advantage over other predators. Not to mention that will keep French from wanting to get some of your spicy preserves.

2. Knowing to taste different kinds of spicy will enrich your culinary landscape.

This is very straightforward, if you don’t eat chilli, you’re really missing out, but there’s more. There being over 14 different varieties of peppers used in Mexican cuisine only, you can make 14 different basic salsas with only ground chili and oil. And going winding down that road, it gets more and more complicated; there’s also the labelling of each salsa according to it’s Spanish name: Salsa borracha (Drunken Salsa), salsa macha (Tough-girl Salsa) , salsa costeña (Seaside Salsa), salsa brava (Brave Salsa), salsa de aguacate (Avocado Salsa), salsa de cacahuate (Peanut Salsa), salsa de molcajete (Mortar Salsa) and over 30 other different recipes. It might be useful to know that these are only for adding to whatever kind of taco you’re eating, these are not stand alone dishes. There’s a different list for marinades and, just like Indian food and their curry, there’s a native word, nahuatl (Aztec’s tongue), for thicker, more robust stand-alone sauces that you can just pour over your favourite concocted dead animal or dead plant: Mole.

▲ From left to right: Basic Chili Salsa, Drunken Salsa, Tough-girl Salsa, Brave Salsa, Avocado Salsa

Names for salsa can be very arbitrary, sometimes they are straight descriptions of what’s in the salsa, but sometimes it might sound like plain nonsense. Salsa de aguacate (Avocado Salsa) it’s pretty straight forward, it’s just a salsa verde (green) with avocado; on the other hand of this simple-complicated spectrum, we have Pico de Gallo (Cock’s beak) which can only be understood if you get into the dirty mindset of the average Mexican sixth grader. So, to describe each salsa better, we could just say what it’s made of, but that’s just listing ingredients, and for that matter, we’ll be better off googling a recipe book than list all of them here.

3. Eating spicy makes your “horny”.

That might actually be a reason not to eat spicy if you’re an uptight ascetic, but if you ‘re not and like to feel a rush of desire going through your mouth, then chilli can give you the extra boost you need to go “groar!”. Plus, you get a heat sensation that blushes your cheeks and a slightly triggers an oral anxiety that can be quenched by some fresh lime juice, or a kiss. It also stimulates your appetite.

4. Cooked tomato is a powerful anti-oxidant.

It’s a fad now, but ancient per-hispanic people and Italians knew it long before we all got concerned about consuming enough anti-oxidants. The details about how it works escape my field of expertise and can be best described as alchemy or magic. But basically if you cook tomatoes you lose on vitamins but gain on lycopene, and that is a good anti-oxidants; you’ll rot slower if you get your fix of those.

▲ Salsa made with cooked tomatoes

5. A bit of pain is good for you.

It’s sounds stupid at first when you think some people seek pain in order to feel “alive” and it’s indeed a mystery why some people punish themselves in order to feel pleasure. Masochism, yes, but in very small healthy doses. Just like riding a roller coaster or watching a horror movie; the controlled exposure to pain or fear will give you a small contrasting shock that reminds your body that you’re doing ok. Not only that, you can step closer to an ecstatic state of mind when numbed by the burning sensation in your mouth. And that’s a good thing too, right?

Guest writer – Julio
Born and raised in Mexico City, I studied catering and service in France. Later on I also studied Chinese cuisine in Beijing and then Thai cuisine in Chiangmai for a shorter period. My heart is split between food and studying, I’m undertaking graduate studies at NCCU and starting my own food business at TongHua night market. I try my best to keep both parts of my heart beating at unison to tell the story of what tastes like and what is meaningful about it. If you love Mexican food, you can find me on my Facebook page and my blog!

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