The Ingredient That Will Change Your Salsa Forever

If you love salsa, then you're probably familiar with the most common types for spooning over your tacos or dipping your chips into. There's pico de gallo, a fresh, uncooked salsa of tomatoes, onion, cilantro, and jalapeño. Salsa roja is a similar mixture of ingredients that are simmered or charred before being blended smooth. There's also salsa verde, which typically features simmered or charred tomatillos, green chiles, onions, and cilantro that are blended smooth.

Of course, there are many more regional types of salsa out there depending on what country or region you're dining in, and some of them feature some pretty surprising ingredients. One of those is a beguiling salsa called salsa Guille, which poet and recipe developer Andrea Aliseda shared on Epicurious. Inherited from Aliseda's paternal grandmother Guillermina, aka Guille, the smooth salsa contains a little bit of peanut butter, which tempers the salsa's heat and lends a creamy texture.

Have you ever heard of salsa with peanut butter stirred in? According to recipe developer Andrea Aliseda, this peculiar recipe came to her by way of her grandmother Guille. A mix of deep-fried onions, garlic, and serrano chiles that are blended with natural peanut butter and topped with chopped peanuts, the salsa contains none of the familiar ingredients we might be used to, such as tomatoes, tomatillos, or citrus. It is, nonetheless, a natural match for, as suggested by Food52, carne asada, crispy mushroom tacos, and even tofu scrambles.

As Aliseda recounted on the podcast The Genius Recipe Tapes, getting to the bottom of this recipe was no easy task. According to Food52, when looking into the origins of the recipe, Aliseda was given a different ingredient list depending on which relative she asked. What the various versions had in common was fried serrano chiles, onions, and garlic. In fact, when peeking into her mother's old recipe book, Aliseda found an older version of the recipe that contained no peanut butter at all. As it turned out, her mother had added it later as an adaptation — one that Aliseda sticks with to this day for its creaminess and heat-taming properties.