Tasting and fixing: more salt, taste again
Ok so we've got three salsas going now, tomatillo, red, and the cilantro's been portioned off to the side for the soap-taste crowd. This lesson isn't a new salsa. This is the step everybody skips and shouldn't, which is actually tasting what you made and fixing it before it hits the table.
Here's the thing. A flat salsa almost never means you're missing some secret ingredient. It means it needs salt. I said this back when we salted the pork, and I'll keep saying it because people forget salsa the same way they forget to season pasta water. You roast the tomatillos right, you toast the chiles right, and then you skip the salt at the end and wonder why it tastes like it's holding back.
The actual process
Get a spoon. A real one, not your finger straight from the blender jar, just for cleanliness sake. Taste the tomatillo salsa plain, no chip, no context.
Ask yourself what it's doing. Usually one of three things:
- Flat — needs salt, plain and simple. Add a pinch, stir, taste again. Not a dump. A pinch.
- Sharp or one-note acidic — needs a little more salt too, actually, salt rounds out acid better than people expect. Sometimes a tiny bit more of whatever's sweet in there, like a smidge more roasted onion, helps too.
- Actually pretty good but boring — that's usually a salt problem still. I know I keep saying salt. It's because it's almost always salt.
Add small, taste, add small again. You can always add more salt. You cannot take it out. I've watched people dump a spoonful in because a quarter-teaspoon didn't move it enough, and then they've ruined the batch and have to make more base to dilute it. Slow down here.
Do this for all three
Same drill for the red salsa. Same drill for the cilantro-adjacent one, though remember that's the one where cilantro goes on individual portions at the end, not into the whole batch — so taste the base without it, fix the salt there, then let people stir their own cilantro in.
This is actually where I figured out the whole portion-the-cilantro-at-the-end thing in the first place. Mckenzie doesn't do cilantro. Says it tastes like soap to her, which sounds like an exaggeration but it's a real genetic thing, some people have the gene that reads it that way. First few years I'd blend it right into the salsa like everybody does and she'd just quietly not eat it, wouldn't say anything, just push it around her plate. Took me embarrassingly long to realize I could just... not blend it in. Season the base salsa so it's good on its own, then set cilantro out separate so anybody can opt in or opt out. Works for the soap people, works for the ones who want a fistful of it. Nobody has to negotiate.
What "fixed" tastes like
You're looking for a salsa where nothing is shouting. Not the salt, not the acid, not the char. If you can pick out "oh that's the salt" as a distinct flavor, you've either under-salted (you'd notice its absence, not its presence) or in rare cases over-salted, which tastes almost metallic and a little sharp in a bad way. Good salt just makes everything else taste more like itself.
Ximena's my taster for this stuff, has been for a while now. She's not gentle about it. Rates things out of ten and if it's a four she tells me it's a four. I've reworked whole batches off her four out of ten before, more salt, then more acid, then finally more salt again till it moved. That's basically what we're doing tonight, just with your own spoon instead of a teenager who doesn't sugarcoat anything.
One caution here, nothing dramatic: if you're tasting with the same spoon over and over, rinse it between dips into different salsas, or use three spoons. Cross-contaminating flavors is annoying, it's not a health thing, just don't let red salsa opinions bleed into your tomatillo batch.
Before next time
Taste something you made this week for salt before you taste it for anything else. See if that's the fix nine times out of ten. It usually is for me too.