Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Now for this salsa we’ve been talking about, this couldn’t be easier. Fresh mangos, a
little thing about fresh mangos- if you find them in the grocery store and they’re beautifully
ripe, buy a bunch of them, take your time, chop them up, and throw them into the freezer.
It’s very rare that you’re actually going to see a really, really good truly ripe, nice
mango. People claim that you can ripen them up by putting them in a bag and setting them
on your counter. Sure, to some degree you can but they’re never as good as a fresh,
beautiful, ripe mango that was picked at the right time that’s nice and sweet and beautiful.
So with that, don’t be afraid of frozen mangos. Don’t be necessarily afraid of canned
mangos even, especially for something like this for like a salsa, it’s fine. -Question
from audience: How can you tell if a mango is ripe, is it supposed to be soft? Answer:
Good question, you want it to have a nice smell to it and the best way I can say to
find that is to find a mango that’s about as hard as a softball, you know that you would
throw off an overpass and someone would get hurt, and smell it and it’s not going to
smell like much. Find a mango that’s too squishy that you’re not going to buy because
it’s overripe, smell it and it’s going to smell almost sickly sweet. You want to
shoot right in the middle. When you feel it you want it to be firm, kind of like a well
done steak. If you press the pad of your hand, it’s firm but it’s got some resistance
to it, that’s what you want. You really don’t want it hard and you want to be able
to smell that sweet mango through it when you smell it right through the skin. You don’t
want any blotches or brown spots on it and you prefer not to see any cuts or nicks on
it. But whether it’s firm or not and the smell is really what you’re looking for.-
So some red peppers, a pinch of cumin, a little bit of garlic, and some corn. Super easy.
We also want to put some lime in there. You can soften up your limes a bit. And with this,
you don’t need the salt. The lime juice and the fresh cilantro that we’re going
to throw in there really are bright enough flavors that you don’t need to have a whole
bunch of extra salt in them. So we’ll take some more of that cilantro that we just chopped
up and put it there. And that’s it it’s so simple. Now you could serve this with pita
chips, tortilla chips, you could put this on top of a grilled chicken sandwich, you
could put this on top of a salad, you could do all sorts of stuff with this. Anything
you might like a sweet southwestern or almost kind of Caribbean flare to, go for it, why
not? Very easy. And that’s something that you can make a couple days ahead of time,
put it in the fridge and take to the tailgate with you. The thing you want to be mindful
about with that is with fresh fruit you don’t want it to be chopped up for more than three
days and you kind of want to judge it by how ripe your mango is. So if you have a mango
that is super ripe and beautiful, you might not want to do it anymore than the day before.
If you have a mango that has maybe a couple of extra days on it, go ahead and do it a
couple of days ahead of time.