Pico de Gallo

Roma tomatoes have less juice and seeds than other varieties. Drain them well to avoid watery salsa. Serrano peppers are hotter than jalapeños - use one for mild heat, two for traditional spiciness. Salt the tomatoes separately first for best texture.

Pico de gallo is one of Mexico's most fundamental fresh preparations — a combination of raw tomato, onion, jalapeño or serrano chile, cilantro, and lime juice, eaten immediately while the ingredients are at their peak. The name pico de gallo, meaning "rooster's beak" in Spanish, is generally thought to describe either the pinching motion of fingers picking up the salsa (resembling a beak's peck) or the small, beak-like cuts of the diced ingredients. The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) was cultivated in Mesoamerica for centuries before Spanish contact; the earliest documented European reference to a tomato-based salsa appears in Friar Bernardino de Sahagún's 1569 encyclopedic record of Aztec culture, where he describes a sauce of tomatoes, chiles, and ground squash seeds sold in Tenochtitlan's market. The jalapeño and serrano peppers are both native to Mexico, domesticated from wild Capsicum annuum plants by pre-Columbian Mesoamerican peoples. Cilantro (Coriandrum sativum) is not native to the Americas — it was brought by Spanish colonizers from the Mediterranean, where it had been cultivated since antiquity — but it was adopted so completely into Mexican cooking that many people associate it primarily with Latin American cuisine. Pico de gallo differs from cooked salsa in that it relies entirely on the freshness and quality of its raw ingredients, which is why the best versions are made and consumed within the hour.