Mango Lime Salsa

Mango Lime Salsa has the perfect ingredients to zing. But it often fails to deliver. Salsa excels when the ingredients meld together and produce a flavor greater than their parts. I have solved the puzzle for Mango Lime Salsa, mine zings. My biggest secret? Well, I have a few, but the biggest is sweet onions. Read on for more.

Developing a better Mango Lime Salsa

Requirements

To develop a better Mango Lime Salsa I set a number of criteria:

• Most importantly, the tastes have to meld together.
• Red onion, frequent in most recipes, has to go. It always seemed to be too strong.
• It needs to be salsa, meaning it needed to have some spicy and acidic punch.
• The mango is the star of this dish, the other ingredients have to enhance the mango
• Lime is the key ingredient that brings it all together, the recipe needs to make the most of it.
• It must be colorful and showy as a condiment.

My recipe meets all of these criteria by changing the ingredients and adapting the techniques.

Inspirations

Using my NLP techniques I found little guidance and help. Almost every recipe was exactly the same – producing the salsa that sounded good, but disappointed. It was clear this approach was not going to address my criteria. Therefore, I looked to two icons of Mexican and Southwestern cuisine for guidance.

Diana Kennedy devoted her life to Mexican cuisine. Studying early civilizations, the influences of the old world, and modern Mexican cuisines. Opinionated and a purist, she believed salsa was, “chilis, onions, cilantro, and tomato” – and nothing else. Although completely chastised by this, recognizing that she would completely disapprove of my efforts, I understood. At the heart of salsa, there are four flavors. You taste all of them together and the acidity brings them together — they work together. It is clear, I am replacing tomatoes with mangos — with significant repercussions.

Donna Nordin is an icon in Tucson, her Café Terra Cotta was a local institution; and her cookbooks, recipes, and classes are guides to Contemporary Southwest cuisine. She presents a Mango Salsa that is a bit different.

Her salsa uses four different types of peppers/chilis and no onions. I took two things from this. First, a diversity of tastes is created from four types of peppers and chilis. Included in the four peppers/chilis is red bell pepper (capsicum). The red bell pepper provides taste and color. Considering the lack of onions, I realize that this Mango Salsa is used as a condiment for a duck dish. Looking at the full preparation, it was clear that onions would be wrong for this duck dish. Conclusion: the right recipe for Mango Lime Salsa depends on the intended use. The second lesson was lime juice, plenty of it – bringing the acidity that will be missing from the removal of the tomato.

Notes of Ingredients for my Mango Lime Salsa

Notes on Techniques for my Mango Lime Salsa

Adjust to Use

The traditional term in recipes is to “Adjust to taste”, meaning adjust your ingredients to your taste. I suggest here the operative term is “Adjust to use”, how tangy, how sweet, and how hot the salsa should be depends on your intended use. Use my recipe as a starting point.

Let it rest

Through testing, I realized that the salsa needs to sit longer than the normally recommended 30 minutes. After mixing in a bowl, cover and refrigerate for at least two hours. The extra time allows water to be released from the sweet onions and for the lime juice to work on the chilis somewhat like a pickling or ceviche result.

I have also found that preparing a day in advance is just fine.