Background: If I have them, I use tomatoes from my garden whenever I can. If I don’t have any growing and but they are available locally in season, I’ll buy fresh tomatoes in bulk when they are on sale and make tomato concassé to freeze. When I’m out of those, I turn to my pantry. Y’all know what I use in my No Cook Pizza Sauce move. I use the same thing to make Pico de Gallo: strained, diced, fire roasted canned tomatoes. Fresh, concassé, and canned tomatoes all make a different version of this, but the rest of the ingredients are the same. We’re not really cooking yet (we’ll get there), and it’s not really a recipe. It’s a series of moves, which I’ve outlined below:
- Get a medium can (15.5 oz) of diced, roasted tomatoes. Drain the roasted tomatoes, reserving the liquid in the fridge for soups and sauces. Place in a large glass bowl.
- I always have several kinds of preserved onions on hand, but for this I use the fresh diced white onions quick pickled in a white vinegar brine that are always in my fridge. I fork them out of the jar, not minding the extra bid of vinegar. Add these to the bowl.
- Chop up the leaves of cilantro. I always use cilantro from the garden unless I don’t calculate my seasons right or a freeze or drought kills off my fresh supply. Store bought is totally fine though. Save the stems for soup. (See No. 5 under mods.)
- Stir everything together, cover, and chill.
- Garnish with lime wedges. I don’t add the lime to the mix before hand because the flavor changes over time.
Why it works:
- For the first step, I have to address the canned veg thing. I generally don’t like canned vegetables for all kinds of reasons, but tomatoes are the exception. While sodium is a concern with canned foods–the brand of tomatoes I use has 280 mg of sodium per serving–this is mostly a garnish, so the sodium doesn’t bother me. In fact, in this instance, I like it because I don’t have to add salt. The salt in the tomatoes actually preserves the product.
- The brine is just a low-acidity vinegar, salt and onions. Because of the sweetness of the onions, I don’t even use sugar. I know I’m going to use limes at service, so I don’t want too much acidity, but I will sometimes put a tablespoonful or two of the onion brine in the mix.
- When considering herbs, I’ll turn to dried if I’ve dried it from my own garden. It makes a different product in that instance, so I’ll grind up some of the coriander seeds with it. It takes things in a different direction, but I’m ok with that. If I have to make a trip to the store, I’ll buy the fresh stuff. When the wild green onions are out in Central Texas, I’ll forage some and throw them into the mix.
- The bowl I use is important here. It fits the right amount of pico based on the can size. It has a flat glass lid so I can always see at a glance how much pico I have left and/or I can stack things on top of it. This is important because it, like my butter dish, is always in my fridge, unless it’s being cleaned. So it has to fit in the fridge and not also make the airspace above it unusable.
- Garnish with lime wedges. I don’t add the lime to the mix before hand because the flavor changes over time. Left without the lime just, it is made from already-preserved products so it will last days in its original form. Over weeks, the flavors and textures will change, but it won’t go bad. It just gets incorporated into something else.
Mods:
- Sometimes I put the same garlic confit I use in the No Cook Pizza Sauce in there. Sometimes I use (gasp) granulated garlic. I never add fresh garlic though because I’m aiming for consistency and refrigerator-shelf-stability and fresh garlic is (ahem) dicey.
- Pico usually has fresh chilies in it. I don’t add to my stock pico on the off chance that a kid wants to try a vegetable. But I always have homegrown chilies in my garden, in my fridge, in my freezer, and (dried) in my pantry. So if I’m cooking for adults I can add a habanero, serrano, or jalapeño.
- I’ll add it to mashed avocado for a really quick quac that doesn’t need much of anything else. But you can also invert the quantities and add the avocado to it.
- Throw in some chilled seafood and you’ve got a nice cold salad. Or throw some (gasp) canned seafood in it and you’ve got what I like to think of as Baltic Avenue ceviché.
- Add it to chicken stock with leftovers from a rotisserie chicken, garnish with leftover tortilla chips and you’ve got a kind of chicken tortilla soup.