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Papalote Salsa

Prep 10 min · Cook 25 min · Makes about 2 cups · Life stories: 0
Here is the food. That was the intro.

Ingredients

  • 5 Roma tomatoes, cored and halved
  • 10 dried árbol chiles, stemmed, halved, and seeded
  • 2 teaspoons dried pasilla chiles
  • 1 tablespoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 2 tablespoons shelled pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
  • 3 tablespoons white vinegar (apple cider vinegar and white balsamic have both worked here too)
  • 1½ cups water
  • ¼ cup minced green onion (optional)
  • ¼ cup chopped cilantro (optional)

Steps

  1. Broil the Romas until the skins are slightly charred. Move them to a pot on the stove.
  2. Add both chiles, the salt, sugar, and 1½ cups water to the pot with the charred tomatoes. Bring to a boil, then simmer 20 minutes. Stir it.
  3. While that simmers, heat the oven to 350°F and toast the pumpkin seeds until just browned. Let them cool.
  4. After the 20 minutes, add the white vinegar and cook 1 minute more.
  5. Blend the tomato mixture with the pumpkin seeds until smooth.
  6. Stir in the green onion and cilantro, if using.
  7. Chill in the fridge. Keeps for a week.

✏️ A copycat of the salsa at Papalote Mexican Grill in San Francisco — the one people drive across the city for.

TIPS — from a person who has actually made this

  • The pumpkin seeds are the whole secret — they thicken the salsa and give it that nutty, roasted body. Do not skip them.
  • Heat lives in the árbol; the pasilla is there for smoke and depth. Want it milder? Pull a few árbol before simmering.
Papalote Salsa
The finished jar. This is what people drive across the city for — except now it's in your fridge, keeping for a week.
Papalote Salsa
Mid-simmer: charred Romas, árbol and pasilla, in the pot. The pumpkin seeds toast separately and meet everything else at the blender.
⚠ AI-Generated Nostalgia — 0% True

The Family Story Nobody Asked For

Every food blog has one. Ours is at the bottom, where it belongs, and was written by a robot with no family. Reading it is strictly optional and mildly discouraged.

On Potrero Hill there lives a man known to all as Burrito Man, and Burrito Man is at war. Not with the neighborhood, which loves him, nor with the hill, which he has climbed ten thousand times, but with himself — and specifically with the one question that has organized his entire adult life: is Papalote or Papito the superior San Francisco burrito establishment?

He has argued it with his friends, who have opinions. He has argued it with strangers, who did not ask. He has argued it, on at least one documented evening, directly with his god — out loud, on the sidewalk, gesturing with a foil-wrapped object for emphasis. His god did not answer, which Burrito Man took, fairly, as a point in favor of Papalote.

The salsa was always the crux. Papalote's is a specific miracle — smoky, nutty, thickened with pumpkin seeds into something you could and should eat with a spoon. Burrito Man could reproduce nearly everything else about a great burrito, but the salsa haunted him. He toasted seeds at midnight. He charred tomatoes until the smoke alarm became a kind of timer. He got close, then closer, then — one Tuesday now spoken of on the hill — he got it exactly.

But a perfect salsa only sharpened the war, because Papito had its own claim to the throne: the fried chicken super burrito, an object of real gravity, structural and moral. Burrito Man now held a flawless Papalote salsa and a deep respect for a Papito burrito, and the two facts lived in him like tenants who would not speak.

It was his friends — gathered, as ever, around a folding table that had seen things — who solved it the way groups solve things: all at once, and by accident. Someone unwrapped a Papito fried chicken super burrito. Someone else set down a jar of the salsa. The two were introduced. There was a silence of the good kind. The war, it turned out, had been a false binary all along.

In conclusion, this salsa is a bridge between two burrito establishments, one hill, and a man finally at peace: Papalote salsa on a Papito fried chicken super burrito, the best of both worlds. Burrito Man rests. The recipe is above, where you found it.

The End. The recipe was above, where you already found it.