Salsa de Chile Costeño

This salsa is from the Costa Chica of Oaxaca. Pinotepa Nacional, Jamiltepec, the small towns along the Pacific between the Sierra Sur and the sea. It is not a Mexico City salsa. It is not even a Valles Centrales salsa. The chile that defines it grows in this stretch of coast and nowhere else, and the salsa carries the place in every spoonful.

Chile costeño rojo is the whole point. Thin-skinned, sharp-heat, grassy and bright, it is what makes this salsa what it is. If you substitute chile de arbol because it looks similar, you have made a different salsa. The costeño is the recipe. Toast it carefully on a dry comal, just enough to wake the oils, never enough to blacken. Burned costeño is bitter and the salsa cannot recover. No me vengas con atajos.

The technique is mercado technique. Char the tomato, garlic, and onion on the comal until the skins blister and the kitchen smells like a market stall in Pinotepa. Steep the chiles briefly in hot water, not boiling, just enough to soften them. Grind everything in a molcajete, the volcanic stone, where the salsa develops the rough, seeded texture you cannot get from a blender. The senoras on the Costa Chica grind their salsa in molcajetes that have been in the family for three generations. The stone is part of the flavor.

This is the salsa that goes on grilled fish pulled off a wood fire on the beach. The salsa for tlayudas costeñas, the larger, thinner version of the tlayuda you find in Oaxaca City, dressed with asiento and beans and whatever the cook has that day. It is the salsa my notebook has under three different names because every cook I met on that coast called it something a little different. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and within Oaxaca, every coast and every sierra has its own.