This is an alternative salsa, something you do not see very often. It is a sweet and hot spicy salsa, that is very good compliment to white meat like fish (tilapia, mahi-mahi etc) and chicken or pork. A quick method to turn this to a marinate is to pass it through a blender. This will pulverize the salsa to a thick marinate. An additional effect of this is the papain. It is an enzyme primarily found in papaya and it has the ability to break down proteins like collagen. This will tenderize the meat making it juicer. Its primary utility actually is the breaking down the tough meat fibers and has been utilized for thousands of years in its native South America.
Although for this recipe we follow the same guidelines as before, the ingredients are almost complete different.
Here are the ingredients. They are significantly less than before but still play well with the rules.
The base
- 1 pineapple
- 4 mangos
- 2 large red onions
The punch
- 3 roasted and skinned jalapeños
- 1/2 serano
The pinch:
- 3 limes (juice and zest)
- 1 bunch of parsley
- 4-5 of mint leaves
Take a ripe pineapple. Overripe is better than under-ripe.
With a serated knife saw the top.
Go around and saw the skin. Make sure you go deep enough to remove the little holes that around the pineapple. They can harbor bacteria.
Cut it in half.
And then in quarters.
Remove the core and cu the quarters into strips that you will then cut into dices.
Just like that. If you think that there are too bug chunks run your knife through them to cut them finer.
Take the mango now and cut the two sides, by running your knife parallel to the large disk shaped seed that mangos have.
Make a cross cut in each piece as sown here.
Then grab the mango piece with the two hands with the cut side facing you and with your fingers push the skin side upwards. This will open the mango like a fan. You can use your fingers to pull the pieces out. Run your knife a few times to make a finer dice.
Clean the onion as we said before. and make radial cuts.
Then cut it again as we said before resulting into a fine dice.
Turn your attention to the jalapeños. Decapitate them….
and with the tip of the knife spit one side open.
With your fingers open it like that.
Know almost like scraping remove the seeds and stack the opened peppers on top of each other.
Slice them in strips that you will eventually cut in fine dice.
Take the limes and pass them over the microplane grader. This will remove the zest.
For this recipe we will need about 2 tbsp of lime zest given or taken some.
Cut them open and squeeze them in the salsa.
Finely dice the cilantro….
Follow that with the mincing of the mint leaves.
Season with some salt. Let the salsa in the refrigerator for at least two hours. This will blend the flavors and make the salsa more cohesive.
The salsa will produce a lot of juice. It is very yummy and very… useful… Try it as topping on chicken… Yummy!
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