Salsa Vizcaína

Salsa vizcaína belongs to Bizkaia, in the Basque Country: a brick-red sauce of choricero pepper pulp and a great weight of onion, traditionally served with salt cod and also at home with meatballs, tripe, or pigs' trotters. What makes it vizcaína is not tomato and not pimentón. It is the sweet dried choricero, soaked until pliable and scraped clean, married to onion cooked down slowly.

The sofrito, the slow onion base, decides the sauce. Keep it low until the onion turns dark gold, soft, and almost jammy, because that long cooking supplies the sweetness that balances the pepper. Rush it and the sauce tastes sharp and hollow. Scrape the softened pepper flesh from its skins with a teaspoon and leave those skins behind. The choricero pulp is the sauce; blending in the skins only gives you bitterness and coarse red flecks.

If dried choriceros are hard to find, use 120g of plain jarred carne de pimiento choricero and skip the soaking. It is the same pepper already scraped, so little changes. If neither is available, twelve dried ñoras are the honest substitute, though the sauce will be fruitier, brighter, and a little less fleshy. No hace falta haber pisado España. Follow the weights and give the onion its time. Siempre sale, si lo sigues. In the Margin beside mine there are six words: the pepper can wait, the onion cannot.