A kilo of pico, please
Nothing screams summer like fresh and citrusy raw food. Pico de gallo is what I think of and crave when it comes to hot summer days. I take a bit of a different approach in ingredient choice and how I bring my Asian influence to the classic pico de gallo.
Pico is superior to salsa. Don’t quote me.
Prep:
Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: Nada!
Ingredients:
2 cups Roma tomatoes - diced
1 cup red onion - diced
1 cup cilantro - finely chopped
1 small lime
2-3 garlic cloves- minced (optional. I know, scandalous)
1 1/2 tbsp red chili powder to taste (not paprika powder, chili powder)
2 fresh green Thai chili if you’re feeling frisky
Coarse salt, or regular table salt to taste
Recipe:
Imagine the minced garlic and chili powder. ✨
The recipe is pretty straightforward, so I’m going more into why I pick these specific ingredients and how I prepare them with intent.
This post will add to your learning of how to prepare food.
Let’s get to preparing!
Roma tomatoes.
Dice them to your liking. I like mine more on the smaller side of the dice.
Ripe-ish Roma tomatoes are a common choice for pico because of their balanced flavor and less water content compared to their cousins. When I buy tomatoes for pico, I feel the tenderness and usually avoid super tender ones as they are too sweet and mushy inside. Pick ripe-ish ones which feel firmer to the touch with a bit of give. This gives the most important base of your pico a crisper and firmer texture.
Red onions
White onions are more commonly used in Mexican/Latin cooking. However, I intentionally choose red onions because of their pungent spicy flavor. Commonly used in Asian cooking, with an almost mild wasabi-like flavor profile, red onions add another layer of depth to your pico to play with the sweet, salty, and sour.
Cilantro
Finely chop your cilantro for this recipe. Essentially when you chop it finer, you are bruising the herb more, hence releasing more flavor. Rather than biting into roughly chopped cilantro and getting that iconic burst of flavor, which is a more common way cilantro is consumed, finely chopping it brings the unmistakable flavor front and center in every bite.
Pro-tip: How fine you dice, grind or mince herbs makes a big difference in how they are absorbed in your flavor profile and texture. For instance, using sliced ginger vs a fine paste can change the profile of how and when the taste of ginger shows up in a recipe.
And never cut off and toss the stem. I know we all lean toward the pretty dark leaves, but cilantro, much like green onions, packs the most nutrients and flavor at the base portion of the roots. Stems are crunchier, so it also adds more texture to the pico. I am a voracious cilantro consumer, if you are more conservative with cilantro be mindful that stems are stronger in flavor than the leaves. So you might have to alter the amount in your cooking.
Asian red chili powder
For me personally, this is where my recipe digs into the Asian influence. Commonly, diced jalapenos are used in pico, which is a quintessential Latin spice. To bring the Asian influence to my recipe, I prefer to use red chili powder because it’s such a staple Asian ingredient/flavor I grew up with. You might think, what flavor does chili powder even add? YOU’RE WRONG! If you didn’t think that then sorry. hehe. NOT to be mistaken with red paprika, used most commonly in the US (and sometimes sold as chili powder), Asianred chili powder has an earthy flavor with an intense heat versus red paprika powder which tends to be more smokey and mildly sweet.
Red chili powder is commonly made with a mix of different chilis, or made of Thai chilis(my fave) and used in almost every Nepalese cooking. Biting into a fresh green Thai chili is commonplace in Nepali eating habits. I love that intense heat, and the grassy flavor. Red chili powder has a similar profile, but gains an earthier flavor through the drying and grinding process.
Annnnnnyways. Mix all the ingredients, squeeze a generous amount of lime juice, and add salt to taste. You can pair this fresh acidic beauty in so many ways. With chips, in your taco, as a hot dog relish or even with laab. I sometimes even eat it with steak. Great way to cut a rich/fatty meal with acid.
Enjoy!
