Salsa: NOT THE DANCE
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the SalsaCast. This is Josh. I'm Chuck. I'm 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 into a bowl, and you've got Stuff You Should Know. Just two guys trying to recapture the magic.

That's been irretrievably lost forever. So 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 a jar at the grocery store that's loaded with high fructose corn syrup.

That you put onto tortillas and shovel in your mouth, just as Mexicans have done for thousands of years. Yes. Not always. There's plenty out there that aren't loaded with high fructose corn syrup. 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 jar has gotten good in recent years. And you can actually thank the – I don't want to say cheap stuff – the more generic, super American versions for laying the groundwork for those better versions to come. Sure.

But what we're doing is just talking about that thing that you dip your chip in that we love that's still very popular, but that got very, very famous in the late 80s and 90s as sort of America's new favorite condiment, outselling ketchup very famously in 1991. Yeah.

And then it overtook cats up in 1992. That's right. And we're going to 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 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 directly like a drink into our mouth. You know what I mean?

I do. But the point this guy is making, and I was being a troll earlier when I was saying that it was authentic just like Mexicans do, eating salsa with chips is thoroughly American. Yeah. And if you go to Mexico, they don't serve chips and salsa because maybe a better analogy would be like if you went to Mexico and they served, well, chips and ketchup. How about that? That's a very direct analogy. Yeah.

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 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 anyways, but...

Yeah, we got to, you know, reminisce a bit together. I remember. It was the Brutalism episode that we talked about my trip to. Yeah, probably. That was great. Anyway, yes, Mexico City is wonderful. If you can make it down there or over there or 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. What, 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 Should Know 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, well, 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 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 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 Mesoamerica,

Because in Central and South America, they really loved to grow chilies and tomatoes. And you put chilies and tomatoes together, you're going to have some kind of a salsa. Yeah. I mean, that's essentially the basic ingredients for salsa. You could make those, you can make a salsa with just those two things. You 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 9,000, 10,000 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? Add a few thousand years of tinkering, something's going to get a little more advanced. And salsa 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 de Sahagun. I have no idea how to pronounce that.

Mm-hmm. Sahagin? Sahagin. S-A-H-A-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 in Tenochtitlan.

That'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. Keep going. You have to finish. 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 exactly what I was thinking. It's about that. Yeah. So he's talking about salsa 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 mocahete is a lava rock mortar and pestle. They're very, very heavy if you get like a real deal one.

can recommend this as a gift, like a housewarming gift to someone, apartment warming gift. Like, you can spend like 50 to 70 bucks on like a really, really nice heavy-duty, real-deal mocha jete, 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, uh,

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 this. Tomato is indigenous to Mesoamerica, right? I think you kind of intimated that earlier. Correct.

Same with chilies. And when the Colombian exchange began, specifically when Christopher Columbus tried chilies for the first time, he compared them to black pepper because that was probably the spiciest thing he'd ever tasted in his life.

And in Spanish, you call that pimento. And so that's why in English we call chilies peppers. But really, chili is a Nahuatl word. I think chili. Yeah. And then they switch the I 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 could.

Got it wrong. Got another thing wrong. That's crazy. Who'd have thought? The word salsa 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 1571 that actually put that in the dictionary, an Aztec style tomato chili condiment listed as salsa in that 16th 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? Okay. Here we go.

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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. Chilies, 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 nightshade family. You did not want to eat a tomato. It was toxic at the very least, potentially deadly. Yeah.

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 the 1700s, 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 to like regular tomato sauce maybe? Yeah.

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, a traditional ingredient found outside of Mexico for salsa. Yeah, but combining the hot chilies with the tomato, I think you also threw in there salt, oil, and vinegar, right?

And at the very end of this recipe, a little gross, but says it is a very tasty sauce, both for boiled dishes or anything else. Boiled dishes. Boiled bacon. Oh, God. I love bacon. Do you remember that in Better Off Dead? No, I don't remember that. His mom boiled...

The mom, John Cusack's mom, boiled everything. And at one point she's serving bacon and it's boiled in like this kind of weird light green, whitish color. It's a really good part. I remember her making, that was a weird part of that movie that everything she made was strange. Mm-hmm. French fries? Yeah. That's good stuff. So the other way that the Columbian 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, which is indigenous to North America, but garlic, cilantro, believe it or not, not indigenous to North America, cumin. 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. 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.

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 stop and think about it, there's a lot of Mexican food, like actual authentic Mexican food that isn't fatty at all. It's just kind of –

charred with a sauce that has no fat to it. 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 salsa became so big in the 80s and 90s because that was during the golden age of everything must be fat-free. So salsa was like

You know, it wasn't some fatty condiment. There were no fatty condiments really. Or were there now that I'm thinking about it. Chunky style fatty condiment. Oh, God. So now we're going to talk about a couple of other sauces.

And that sounds like something from like a future movie or something. It does. 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 going to talk about a couple of things now that are close to salsa, but not.

And that is mole and hot sauce. We're not going to 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 mole is that mole is, it's basically always pureed. It's not going to be, it's never going to be chunky. Kind of the same with hot sauce, but mole also usually has like,

I mean, if you got a good mole going, you're talking 15, 20, up to 30 or more ingredients. That's kind of what makes mole a mole. Yeah. So you have a really sophisticated layered tastes with mole. Um, that can be like, it can be tangy. It can also be kind of like weirdly raisiny or mushroomy or something like that. It's, it's, it's, it's different. But as far as a person walking around Mexico is concerned, that'd be like, um,

comparing ketchup to gravy. They're just different. Yes, they both go on your food, but in different ways, in different contexts, in 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 mole 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 tostada, whereas the mole, it would be like, you know, chicken mole 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, but then they say that in Spanish. Right.

And the other thing is hot sauce, of course, also different. Hot sauce meant to be, although there are some super hot salsas, 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 19th 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. Yeah.

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? Are we going to 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. No, 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 you 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, Nevada, California, a lot of Colorado was Mexico. But once that

It 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 1920s and 30s 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 Cali-Mex or Southwest-Mex was born, which is...

It was originally, at least, authentic Mexican dishes, but kind of toned down a little bit, made a little blander, made a little more Yorkshire pudding-y. You know what I mean? Yeah, not as hot. Made for the American palate. I think Dave dug up this recipe from 1934 in the L.A. Times.

For chili salsa, the name of the article was delicacies from Mexico. And even though it said in the article, the salsa is used in many Spanish dishes, I think it was just a time when they were like, Mexico, Spain, what's the difference? Right. When in fact, there's a pretty big difference, including an ocean in between them. Yeah. And also the recipe included parsley and flour. Yeah. Yeah.

You just don't see that in many salsa dishes. So it was kind of Tex-Mex-y for sure. I think even before Tex-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.

And 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 Pace was a Louisiana guy, born and raised. His family was in the molasses business, bottling molasses. So he had a background in bottling and jarring a food product. Went to World War II, settled down in San Antonio, Texas eventually, where the Mexican food scene was and is robust. You've been there, right? You've talked about the food there with me, I believe, privately. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely. It's good stuff. Never been there. I got to do it. But he loved that chili salsa that he would get locally at different Mexican restaurants. And he like you said, he he settled down the taste a little bit, made his own his own variety called called Pace Picante. Yeah. Picante is an adjective meaning spicy or pungent.

If you notice, if you look at the jar, it doesn't say salsa on there. No. It says picante sauce. And the tomato was the star. The chili took a little bit of the back seat. And he had a goal to be what he said was the Heinz of salsa. And although he did well, it would be his son-in-law, Kit Goldsberry, who would really kind of kick that brand to the next level.

Yeah. I mean, that's pretty ambitious. I want to be the Heinz of salsa. And it actually turned out that way. But just, yeah, not under his watch. He retired and Kit took over, I think about the late 70s, sometime in the 70s. And at that same time, there was a health craze going through America that translated, like I think you said earlier, by the 80s into everything has to be fat free.

And salsa, again, is basically by definition fat-free. So it was ready-made to step up and kind of take the spotlight. And Pace was very lucky that Kit Goldsberry was in charge because he, I guess, knew a great opportunity when he saw it and just pushed Pace into the mainstream through a really clever strategy.

earworm-y 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 going to say it. And that's from like the, like 1989 was when that first ad came out. Yeah, that's right. And in 1993, we got the famous line, get a rope.

You go look this thing up on YouTube. This ad ran for 10 years from 93 to 2003 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 Steadman 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. Jeez. But yeah, Ralph Bonzo Bear Steadman was, just want to shout him out because it's an iconic commercial line. It's kind of up there with where's the beef. Yeah. And he's a guy from the north. Where's they beef?

Oh, she passed away too. No, no. Instead of where's the beef, where's a beef? Where's a 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 2014 and left a very sweet family behind. So big shout out to Bonzo Bear.

So, yeah. So, 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 alternative to everything else, like ketchup and stuff. People were also, like, trying new tastes. Exotic, ethnic tastes. Sure. Like, Mexican salsa, chunky style. Oh, yeah. Was just really –

you were really sophisticated if you ate salsa, not ketchup at a time in like the late 80s. 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 obvious,

hysterical, but I can't believe that salsa ever outsold ketchup. It's mind-boggling to me. Yeah. 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 where the stuff that you buy in jars at the grocery store today is often pretty good, really good.

Yeah. And chances are, uh, your local grocery store may even have like a, like a house made version that they sell in, in like the little plastic containers that has a, you know, a sell by date on it, that kind of thing. Sure. You usually see those. My favorites are the, uh, well, we'll save that.

But, again, chips and salsas is a pretty American thing. They do have the tostada in Mexico, but a tostada is used to sort of like an open-faced taco to put stuff on top of, and then you'll put your salsa on top of that. Right. 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 Fritos specifically by a guy named Elmer Doolin. I wonder where I heard that before. Remember we talked about Frito feet, how dogs get Frito smell on their feet. And that chapter features an illustration of Momo wearing a long haircut.

That's right. If you don't have a book, you should get it just to see Momo in there. And 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. Oh, you want to do that? Yeah. All right. You want to hear about Elmer Doolin? Go drop. You probably get that thing for like six bucks now. Go to your library even. Yeah. Get it for free. Go crack a book. Yeah.

All right. Let's move on to story number two then, Josh. I like that. Rebecca Webb Carranza. She's married to a guy named Mario and they own the El Zarapa Tortilla Factory in LA in the 1940s. And they made corn tortillas kind of straight up. But when they had misshapen 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 tort chips and

And apparently it was a pretty big seller in the 1940s and 50s regionally. And then eventually, I think nationwide even. Yeah. I mean, imagine like you had tortilla chips that you could buy in the 40s. 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 candidate, don't you think? It's got to 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, a Hispanic Teddy Roosevelt.

Okay. He kind of does. And he wasn't 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 60,000 pounds of tortilla chips a day.

All the way back in the 19-teens. That's amazing. He probably was the guy who created the tortilla chip. Yeah, I think so. And...

You know, it's impossible 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 free 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 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, for sure. People say, I care not. I mean, even if you pay something, they're going to 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 salsa like made with Goldschlager, that would cost something. 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, their AskHistorians 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 Macayo or El Nido. They apparently were owned by the same person in Phoenix that by the early to mid 70s was already serving chips and then transferred over from hot sauce. People used to put hot sauce on their chips to salsa. Right.

serving salsa with chips. So it's possible that was the first restaurant to do it. But what 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 Reddit historian. Well, no, the Reddit historian found all that. So kudos to them. Yeah, I got you.

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 jete out and get busy right after this. ♪♪♪

Hi, icons. It's Paris Hilton. Check out my new single, Chasin', featuring Meghan Trainor. Out today. I would have died for you. Now I'm saying goodbye to you. Cause I'm done chasing you.

I feel so lucky to collaborate with Megan and how perfectly she put my experience into words. Listen to Chasen from my new album, Infinite Icon, on iHeartRadio or wherever you stream music. Don't forget to visit InfiniteIcon.com to pre-save my album. Sponsored by 1111 Media.

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The first salsa we should talk about is just the classic. It's my favorite kind of salsa overall, the pico de gallo.

I love a salsa that's almost nothing but chunks, which is basically what pico de gallo is. Extremely fresh. Yeah, not a lot of saucy tomato in there even, just diced up tomato, onion, chilies, cilantro, lime juice, a little bit of salt. Bing, bang, boom. I'd throw a little black pepper on top, but that's just me. Oh, Christopher Columbus would be proud. He 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 pico de gallo for especially, 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 gallo actually means beak of the rooster or rooster's beak.

Did you know that? I didn't know that. I always just thought it meant pico de gallo. It never occurred to me. Because gallo, you know, that's like a kind of beer in Guatemala. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of because it's got a rooster on the bottle. Yeah. So they call it beak of the rooster apparently because people used to eat pico de gallo with their index finger, middle finger, and thumb. They would just scoop it into their mouths. And that resembles kind of a chicken or a rooster's beak.

diving into that bowl of pico de gallo infecting it with all manner of communicable diseases for the next person to take to which is actually kind of a problem with the fresh salsas yeah i mean you know anytime it's a fresh fresh produce like that there could be the danger of some sort of salmonella or something but lime juice will kill that away you hope can we talk about chipotle

Well, real quick, have you had the salsa schnipek? I have not. I haven't either, but it sounds good. It's basically pico de gallo with some stuff swapped out. But 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.

Uh, they're a little tangier. Uh, a lot of this stuff is usually roasted, uh, tomatoes, garlic, onion, those chipotles. You roast those things up, get a little, little, uh, fire char on them and then grind them or blend them into a paste. And you got a pretty good chipotle working. Uh, then there's salsa verde, which is made from tomatillos, which have a green cast to them. They're like little tiny green tomatoes, but tastes much better. Yeah.

I'm not sure what's going on with tomatillos, but they're pretty awesome. And that one's just pretty straight up. Like you kind of want the tomatillo to stand out taste-wise, but it can also be kind of hot. It's garlicky, oniony, there's some cilantro and all that. But the point is the tomatillos are really, it's a really tomatillo forward salsa. It's green.

Sure. That's why they call it salsa verde. Yeah. But I have to say, I just have to shout this out. If you want a good jarred salsa verde, you could do a lot worse than Trader Joe's. I don't know that I've ever had a jarred salsa verde, actually. It's really good. And it's actually hard to find a good one. I think Mateo's makes a good salsa verde 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 Joe's. I did when I lived in L.A. because it was convenient, but I haven't been in yours. Salsa matcha 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—

and especially outstanding Mexican chef. His parents owned a Mexican restaurant, legendary Mexican restaurant in New Jersey for decades that recently closed. But Mexican Food Factory, shout them out. I guarantee you there's some listeners that have been there. But PJ was like, you got to have the salsa matcha. You just, you won't believe it. Just try it. It sounds awesome. It's great. It's not like a traditional salsa you'd see. It's like an oil sauce.

Um, so you've got your, your dried chilies, of course, but you also have like, uh, ground peanuts, garlic, sesame seeds, olive oil, and vinegar. So no tomato in this guy. Um, 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 Veracruz, which also gave us Pescado Veracruz, which is the best way to have a fish.

Yeah, I thought it was Oaxacan 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. Yeah. You can find, especially in the last decade, so many more options besides like Tex-Mex and Mexicali, which I still love that sort of Americanized version. Yeah.

But you can find some great authentic places and Oaxacan 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 a matter of fact, you don't ever have to leave the U.S. Everybody just comes to us. Do you want to go over some of these other non-Mexican versions?

Yeah, the one that stuck out to me was aji creolo. That's right. It's like Creole sauce. And in Peru, they make it with sour cream or mayo, some garlic, and then aji 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 chilies, the Aji, I guess, A-J-I 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 ubiquitous. It's like ketchup on the table. Yeah, because it's a condiment.

Uh, he also threw in chimichurri in here from, uh, Uruguay slash Argentina. I don't know. I don't know if chimichurri 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, um, pepper or tomato. Yeah. Is there, there's, I don't think there's peppers in chimichurri. Is there? I think it's all like parsley and, uh, garlic, cilantro, garlic, a lot of oil. I don't think there's peppers. Yeah.

Yeah. It's good, but I don't think it's salsa. I agree. Should we just cut this part out? No. We need to leave it in as a lesson to everybody never to call chimichurri salsa or else they'll have to answer to us. Well, Dave put it in there. So you know what I have to say to Dave is get the rope. Where's the beef, Dave? There was one other thing I wanted to mention too. 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 La Fonda.

They are doing something to their salsa that is unparalleled. It's the most sophisticated free salsa you've ever seen. And it's not small batch. They have literal vats 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 or two, in my opinion. Well, you'll be glad to know then, my friend, there is a La Fonda that opened up right down the street from me.

All right, let's do dinner. Last year. And if you go to the East Lake La Fonda, everyone, I can encourage you to go across the street on 2nd 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 built.

run. Emily, Emily like runs that thing. If you go there and, uh, it looks beautiful and there are all kinds of, uh, 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 Eastside garden is just open for the public to use and enjoy, uh, after you've had some La Fonda and she just recently put up a new, uh, Instagram page, uh,

So if you want to, doesn'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. You just get stuffed on La Fonda and walk around the community gardens in East Lake. That sounds like a 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 know it's the East Lake Garden because there's a sign that

This is Eastlake Garden painted by local legend artist R. Land. Is that the one with the praying hands? Yeah. And the cat? The praying hands and lost cat and pray for Atlanta during COVID. So Ronnie's a very longtime Atlanta resident and very popular local artist. And we've commissioned Ronnie to do lots of things, including the sign for the Eastlake Garden in his unique, amazing style.

And this has been Hotlanta Talk with Josh and Chuck. Yeah, that's it for salsa. Go out and eat salsa every day. Yes. Go eat salsa. Go learn how to make mole's 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 Tamara.

And Tamara included a postscript pronunciation I'm looking up real quick. Okay, got it. Hey, guys. Listening to the Widowhood episode reminded me of one of my favorite stories about my great-grandmother, Judita. When my grandmother was little, 1930s Pennsylvania, her father supported the family as a coal miner, and her mother, Judita...

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 his

Wow. Wow.

Are they going to take my children? Yes, it's very likely.

Awesome. Yeah.

And whenever I think life is rough, I recall Judita 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 Tamara, 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 97 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 stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

The National Sales Event is on at your Toyota dealer, making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new car, like a legendary Camry, built for performance and available with all-wheel drive. You can count on your new Camry to get you anywhere you need to go. Or check out an affordable and reliable Corolla. With a trim for every lifestyle, from the hip sedan to the sporty hatchback, there's a Corolla built just for you. Check out more National Sales Event deals when you visit buyatoyota.com. Toyota.

Let's go places. Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then there are moments that remind us to be more human. Thank you for calling Amica Insurance. Hey, I was just in an accident. Don't worry, we'll get you taken care of. At Amica, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking. It's human. Amica. Empathy is our best policy.

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