About Salsita MX
Salsita MX is a reference for Mexican salsas and the chiles they are made from. It is not a general cooking blog that happens to have some salsas — it is a specialized catalog, run from Mexico, structured so you can find a salsa you can make with what is already in your kitchen.
Why the English section exists
If you look up in English how to substitute a guajillo chile, or how hot an ancho is, you will find plenty of answers, and they often disagree — different pages give very different heat ranges for the same chile, and substitution charts tend to list swaps without saying what changes.
This section tries to be consistent and specific instead. Every heat range on this site comes from a single shared table, so no page here contradicts another, and every substitution says what you lose by making it.
It is not a translation
The Spanish and English sides of this site are different products, on purpose.
In Spanish, the site is organized around recipes — a reader in Mexico already knows what a guajillo is and wants to know what to do with it.
In English, it is organized around the chiles — because the common situation is the reverse: you have a bag of dried chiles and you are not sure what they are, how hot they are, or what to use instead.
So the English section puts the chile guide and the substitution chart up front, notes what each chile is actually called in US stores, and writes recipes in cups, ounces and Fahrenheit rather than converted metric.
Who is behind it
The site is run and signed by Fermín Vega. He is not a chef and does not claim to be: he does not eat without salsa, has no favorite region, and picks places to eat as much for their salsa as for their food.
More on the author page.
How this site is made
The text is drafted with the help of AI. Fermín Vega reviews and edits it before publication and answers for what it says. We say so here and in the byline of every page, because readers should know how what they are reading was produced.
The recipes are traditional preparations. A raw tomatillo salsa belongs to nobody. What the site adds is organization, one comparable heat scale, cross-referencing by ingredient, and the US-specific notes.
Photos are being added as each salsa is made. Until a recipe has its own photograph, its page is published without one. That is deliberate: a stock photo or a generated image would show a dish that is not the one described.
Times are complete, and they are a guide. They include charring, soaking and waiting, and they will vary with your stove and your ingredients.
Heat comes from one table. Chiles vary between harvests, sometimes by a factor of two, so treat every range as a guide and taste before you serve.
About availability
Some ingredients are simply hard to get in the US. Pulque does not travel. Fresh chilaca is rare. Chicatana ants are foraged a couple of nights a year.
Where that is the case, the site says so plainly and gives the closest available alternative, along with what changes — or says there is no real substitute.
How it is funded
This site is funded by advertising served through Google AdSense, which labels its ads as ads. There are no affiliate links, no sponsored recipes and no paid placement.
Contact
[email protected], or the contact page. Corrections are genuinely welcome — if something here is wrong, saying so gets it fixed.