Pico de Gallo Recipe: Spicy Mexican Tomato Salad

I set out to make pico de gallo, a spicy Mexican salad. Mexican cuisine is one of the most varied in the world. It brings together the traditions of ancient peoples like the Aztecs and those of the Spanish, who arrived on the American continent more than 500 years ago.

A quirky blend of European and Eastern culinary traditions with the cooking art of the Aztecs and the Maya.
One of the most common dishes of Mexican cuisine is the taco, a sandwich made with a corn or wheat tortilla. It is often filled with salsa, guacamole, hot sauces or salads, or chili. It is especially tasty when the filling is a salad.

I've had tacos with pico de gallo (Spanish for “chicken's beak” or “rooster's beak”).

Pico de gallo differs from the familiar salsas only in how finely the ingredients are chopped. But it always contains small red tomatoes, onion and chili peppers. In some parts of Mexico, pico de gallo means a spicy salad with sweet lime juice and salty chili powder. But that's an exotic version that not everyone understands even in Mexico. Meanwhile, making pico de gallo is no trouble at all.

Unfortunately, we only have two kinds of hot chili here: some red one and some green one. So you have to improvise and adapt recipes, cooking “inspired by”, so to speak, guided more often not by how it should be done but by how not to harm your health. After all, there are chili varieties that, rumor has it, eat through glass. Just kidding.

But, as they say, every joke has a grain of joke in it. Habanero peppers are 60 times hotter than ordinary chili. Just 1 gram of habanero is enough to make 30 liters of sauce fiery. Habaneros were supposedly offered to people condemned to death as an alternative to the sacrificial knife. They say there were no takers.

Without overthinking it, let's use what we have and make a spicy salad.