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Slide 1: Maudie's Famous Salsa and Pico de Gallo Transcription Sample of a complex 5 minutes Audio
Slide 2: Hello everybody, I’m Joe Draper with Maudies Tex Mex in Austin, Texas, and we are here to benefit Caritas of Austin and also to benefit yourselves by sharing some of our recipes with you today. We will be making pico de gallo, pico de pina, and our wonderful salsa. Just to tell you a little bit about Maudies, I bought the café from Maudie in 1992 and have been operating it since.
Slide 3: Pico de gallo is one of my favorite things to serve. These are the ingredients here. Onion. We go ahead and chop that very fine so it doesn’t dominate the flavor. This is fresh tomato. You can skin that if you like, or leave the skin on, works really well for us. That’s the way we do it. Fresh lime juice, chopped cilantro, and this is a serrano pepper. It’s a little hotter than a jalapeno so it’s very important to cut very, very small, fine pieces off so, again, the bite is not dominated with the flavor of the pepper.
Slide 4: Then we use a little salt. I prefer to use kosher salt or organic sea salt because the flake is a little bigger and it doesn’t burn a hole in your tongue when you get a single grain. So, once you have all of these ingredients together, it’s just simply a matter of mixing them together. Peppers vary in heats, and you can control the amount of heat you use in your end products.
Slide 5: You can do that by putting a little more of the pepper in or a little less of the pepper in. The heat in the pepper is determined a lot by the minute it’s picked, the climate that it’s been subjected to while it’s ripening. If it’s in hot sun and really struggling for water then it’s going to be a really hot pepper. If it’s been raining every day, then the pepper is not going to have much heat in it. Salt it just to taste.
Slide 6: It’s going to be a good mix. Now this will be good for three to four days. It will kind of get a little softer and the flavors will mix together the longer you keep it in the refrigerator. But it is ready to eat and, again, will be really good for you for several days to mix together. It’s truly really a beautiful color and consistency. See how it turns out here.
Slide 7: Next, we are going to make pico de pina, which is a wonderfully refreshing garnish that is used in Mexican food to garnish pork tacos, tacos al pastor. It can also be used as a pico de gallo, you know, to eat with chips, and it’s good with seafood. You can stuff fish with it. It’s really nice and light and summery. These are our ingredients.
Slide 8: The pineapple, and I suggest you use as ripe a pineapple as you can manage. I like to buy these things and let them sit around for about a week in the kitchen. Try to get a little direct sunlight on them. You will know when it is ready by the consistency of it. It will get a little soft to the touch and then if you smell the very stalk of it you will actually be able to smell the sweetness when it is ready to go.