After a year-and-a-half of living and eating here, I’ve finally started to understand Mexicans’ deep, intense love affair with condiments.
For those of you who aren’t as well acquainted with how Mexicans — specifically chilangos — eat, here are a few examples:
1. People here eat pizza with Worcestershire sauce (known in Spanish as salsa inglesa) and snow cones with chamoy.
2. They eat sushi, gleefully, with gobs of cream cheese.
3. They pile tortas with layers of ingredients (do you know the torta cubana?) and mix seafood cocktails with ketchup and hot sauce.
4. Jugo Maggi, a concentrated, salty sauce, is ever-present at restaurants, to sprinkle on soup or meat or pasta. The vinegary, hot Salsa Valentina is often served too, to drench on saltine crackers, potato chips, peanuts and fruit.
Basically, a dish is not appetizing here unless it is salty, spicy, creamy, meaty and acidic all at once.
I used to turn my nose down at the whole 12-tastes-at-once flavor profile. But recently — maybe it’s taking my cooking classes or starting Eat Mexico — I’ve become much more appreciative of how peculiar and Mexican this is.
The torta, for me, has become a thing of wonder: a single sandwich, the base of which is avocado, tomato, beans and mayonnaise. (That’s the base!) The bread is scooped out to make room for the fillings, because it is not acceptable to pile less than one-inch’s worth of two types of meat, cheese, pineapple and a fried egg. (Depending on what you’re ordering.)
While cream cheese is not an authentic sushi ingredient, it is quite utilitarian in holding your Mexican sushi roll together, especially when said roll contains grilled onions and camarones al ajillo. Worcestershire sauce adds a salty umami kick to pizza. After taking a few bites, regular pizza suddenly feels… plain.
Lately I’ve taken to sprinkling Salsa Valentina on saltine crackers. It’s kind of like an appetizer and bar snack rolled into one. A year ago I would’ve never, ever done this.
I’m curious whether you find yourself adding a bunch of condiments to your food, too. What are your favorites?
Morita and/or chipotle sauce + pizza = happy happy.
I’m using these sauces constantly: eggs, beans/rice, pork tenderloin. Can’t seem to get enough.
Yum — I love morita sauce. Never thought about putting it on pizza before. I think it’s going to make me very happy, too. I’ll have to let you know how it turns out. I’ve got a bag of dried moritas in the pantry and nothing but time…
my novio and I bring Valentina to the movies for putting on the popcorn. It really needs lime, too, but that is more messy. I stash Tajín everywhere, just in case!
Valentina and Maggi are also good for chelas. A mariscos truck in my city will give you a styrofoam cup full of ice, limón, maggi, salsa ingles and valentina to have a chela with your tostadas. You just have to supply the beer.
Graciela: I *love* that you smuggle in your own Valentina sauce to the movie theater! You’re kind of my hero. 🙂 Also, I can see a huge demand for this michelada-fixins truck in the U.S. Someone needs to jump on that.
The truck with the chela-fixins is in my city in the U.S.!
Well do tell where, because if it’s somewhere I visit regularly, I must stop by!
See, this is partly why I think I was meant to be a Mexican. I’m regularly asked if I’d like some fries with my ketchup or chips with my salsa. 🙂
Tajín on all the fruit of course!
Valentina just for fried stuff
Salsa inglesa just in case of lame pastas.
“Lame pastas” made me laugh. Gotta remember that next time I’m at a mediocre Argentine restaurant.
I’m hearing everyone on the Tajín. But why don’t they sell it in bigger containers? The only thing I’ve managed to find are the small bottles. (Perfect for stashing in your purse, I guess.) Am I looking in the wrong place?
I travel with Tajín 😀
You can get a bigger bottle in superama or Walmart-
When I was in Mexico about 10 years ago, we ordered Domino’s Pizza and they gave us Ketchup packets instead of cheese and crushed peppers like they do in the States. This was in Cuernavaca so I always thought that is how they ate pizza in Mexico. I attended a school in California where the student population was about 90% Mexican and I would see people dipping their pizza in ketchup and this only helped further my belief. Anyway, I am also very familiar with Valentina since my dad had an ice cream truck and would sell chips and had this sauce. A lot of people like it over their chips like Doritos, Ruffles, and even hot cheetos. The popular one for Hot cheetos though is chamoy although there was a craze a few years back of hot cheetos with melted nacho cheese and jalapeños (they had this in schools and any liquor store) which eventually got replaced by Tostilocos. I’m not really big on condiments but if I use something I usually go for Tapatío hot sauce on fries or burgers and it is in small amounts.
Of course you’d make your own. I cheat and simply use the Morita sauce that 50 Friends has on its tables (we order pizza once a week and the nice guys at 50 Friends toss a bottle in the box for me.)
Also outstanding and in the same spirit: Cholula sauce on buttermilk french fries and Tabasco sauce on potato chips.
Our favorite bottled salsas are the Cosecha Purhépecha brand, manufactured in Chilchota, Michoacán.
http://www.pbase.com/panos/chilchota
Of those, our favorites are the Salsa Chipotle, the Chile de Árbol, and more recently, the intense Salsa de Chile Habanero rojo. We haven’t found that one in stores yet, but I bought a bottle from Mariscos La Güera when we were having yet another excellent meal there.
The others: Perón, Habanero Verde, Habanero Naranja, are o.k., but not in the top ranks.
I used to like cream cheese, before we moved here. Now we rarely eat it.
Yo le pongo chimichurri!
It’s widely known among my friends that I always keep a mini bottle of tajín in my purse and one in my desk at work. I only buy my tajín in Mexico though because whatever they sell here in the U.S. and call tajín does NOT taste like tajín from Mexico! On one occasion when I was in San Antonio, I went out for margaritas with friends–we all had mango margaritas, and guess who they high-fived and loved for the rest of the night because we had tajín instead of sugaring or salting the glass rims? That’s right; this girl right here! I normally buy the mini bottles (that are about 3-4 uses each) from Walmart or Superama & they come in a 10-pack in a little box. Then I buy a couple bigger bottles and just refill the little ones.
The other two condiments I always bring back from Mexico are salsa Bufalo (similar to Victoria) for putting on potato chips or chicharrones with lime juice, and Knorr Suiza de pollo, de res & de tomate. The Knorr granules they sell here in the identical jar don’t taste the same and are WAAAAAY too salty, so once a year, I usually buy a big jar of each in Mexico and bring them back.
Aside from condiments, there are a number of other items (food and non-food) I like to bring back because they don’t taste the same in the U.S. I’ve even contemplated bringing back the blue primavera-scented Suavitel from Mexico so my laundry will smell like my suegra did it because the blue primavera Suavitel they sell in my local grocery stores here smell disgusting and nothing like what it smells like in Mexico!
I have to chime in… Mi hijo, just 7 years old, loves the Salsa Valentina on crackers and will sometimes take that as his lunch to school. I remember eating that as a kid for a snack and just loved it. My mom would get upset saying it was not good for my tummy to have all that chile and acido.
Oh, I miss Mexico so much! This post made me so happy. I completely forgot about putting salsa inglesa on my pizza and now I’m daydreaming about potato chips smothered in Valentina, bought from a street cart of course…. mmmmmmm. Thanks for this!
Lesley just discovered your blog! What a treasure!!! Keep the good blogs coming : )
OK maybe I am the only crazy one but I use Valentina in my pizza…once you go there you will never go back to bland pizza…EVER!
Thanks Eli! I’m glad you like it. I’ve just gotten into the Salsa Inglesa on pizza, give me some time to get to Valentina. 🙂
As a Brit, I wondered why Mexicans call Worcestershire Sauce (or as we call it “Wooser Sauce”) “salsa inglesa” when we call Salsa, well “Salsa”. Then I realised that a notable minority of Brits (myself included) throw it on… well everything and that’s probably what some Mexicans do with Salsa, so it makes sense. There’s no excuse for you Americans though! It’s “Wooster Sauce”! Don’t even get me started on football..
BTW reading this makes me want to see Mexico..