How To Make Mango Salsa de Gallo

I’m not doing this just to get angry comments from salsa fans, or pico de gallo purists. I swear I’m not. I was just trying to make something tasty with all the cilantro I’m getting from the garden, and the gorgeous mangoes they’ve had on sale at the grocery store the last couple of times.

So the ingredients are sort-of like a salsa recipe, and sort-of like a pico de gallo recipe. And the texture is a bit chunkier than most salsa, but a bit wetter than most pico.

One thing I’m sure of: This stuff is tasty as all get-out. Yes, I just said “all get-out”. You got a problem with that?

Ingredients

tomatoes — about 5 baseball-sized*
jalapeños — 2-4, to taste
1 onion — softball-sized*
2 mangoes
2 cups fresh cilantro
1-3 tablespoons sugar, to taste

* If it weren’t for sports, how would we tell people what size fruit was? Or hail?

PS: I ended up not adding the vinegar. It didn’t need it for flavor, and it was already wet enough without it.

Directions

Cut the stems out of the tomatoes.

Cut them in half and squeeze out the seeds.

You can keep the seeds and juice until the end in case you want to add it back in for a thinner sauce.

Cut the stems off the jalapeños and split in half lengthwise.

Scoop out the seeds and pulp.

The pulp carries most of the heat, so if you want yours hotter, leave it in. (Obviously I wasn’t planning on adding the tomato juice back in.)

Cut into matchsticks, then in half.

You can dice the jalapeños really fine, but I’ll be putting these in the food processor, so I just wanted to make sure I didn’t have any large pieces sneak through.

Peel the onion, cut in half, then cut the half into quarters.

Toss the jalapeños and onion in the food processor (or your trusty Ninja).

Pulse a few times to give the onions a coarse chop.

Add half the tomatoes and pulse a few more times.

At this point the sauce was thinner than I had been planning, since my tomatoes were a couple of days past their prime.

This is where I decided that it wasn’t going to be quite a traditional pico de gallo. No problem.

Next up, the rest of the tomatoes, and a quick pulse.

Add to the sauce.

Prep the mangoes.

Toss them in and pulse.

Add to the sauce.

Yes, there’s more mango than tomato. That’s a good thing.

Because I like my salsa /pico chunky, I diced the other half of the onion by hand.

Finally, chop the cilantro just a little bit and toss it in.

Give everything a stir and taste. If it’s too hot, add a little sugar.

I used raw sugar with very large grains, so it took a while to dissolve so I could taste it again. Next time I’ll go with regular white sugar.

Refrigerate for about an hour to give everything time to blend together.

And that’s it.