By Peanut salsa macha
Salsa macha with peanuts and sesame, confited in oil. Keeps two months on the shelf and is the version most people prefer.
- Prep
- 10 min
- Cook
- 15 min
- Makes
- about 2 cups
- Difficulty
- Medium
Real heat that fades with a drink of water. Jalapeño territory.
Ingredients
Makes about 2 cups
- ¾ cup peanut raw, unsalted, skins on
- 20 chile de arbol stemmed
- 4 guajillo chile stemmed and seeded, torn up
- 1½ cups vegetable oil
- 6 cloves garlic peeled
- 3 tbsp sesame seeds sesame seeds
- 2 tsp salt
- 2 tsp piloncillo or dark brown sugar
- 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar (optional)
Keeps 2 months at room temperature, in a sealed jar
Method
- 1
Heat the oil in a small saucepan over medium-low. It should be warm, never smoking — around 250°F if you have a thermometer. This is a confit, not a fry.
- 2
Fry the garlic 3 minutes until pale gold, then lift it out with a slotted spoon.
- 3
Add the peanuts. Fry 4 minutes, stirring, until they turn a shade darker. Lift them out too.
- 4
Add the sesame seeds for 30 seconds — they burn faster than anything else here — and lift them out.
- 5
Turn the heat to low. Add all the chiles at once and fry 90 seconds, pushing them under the oil. They should darken slightly, not blacken. Take the pan off the heat.
- 6
Let everything cool for 15 minutes. Blending hot oil is dangerous and it also overcooks the chiles in residual heat.
- 7
Blend the chiles, peanuts, garlic, sesame, salt and piloncillo with about half the oil, in short pulses. Stop while it is still coarse — macha is not a smooth sauce.
- 8
Stir in the remaining oil and the vinegar by hand. Jar it. The oil should sit visibly above the solids.
Good with
Eggs · Grilled meat · Pasta and noodles · Spooned over almost anything
Salsa macha is chiles and seeds confited in oil, and it is the Mexican answer to the question chili crisp answers — except it got there first, out of Veracruz, and it uses peanuts.
The peanut version is the one most people end up preferring. The nuts absorb heat, add body, and turn it into something you eat by the spoonful rather than in drops.
It is a confit, not a fry
The single most important thing here is temperature. The oil should be warm, around 250°F — hot enough to bubble gently around a chile, never hot enough to smoke.
At frying temperature the chiles blacken in seconds and the whole batch turns bitter. At confit temperature they slowly release their oils, color and flavor into the oil over a minute and a half.
If you have no thermometer: drop in one chile. It should fizz gently at the edges. If it sizzles hard or darkens within ten seconds, the oil is too hot — pull the pan off and let it cool.
Everything comes out in stages
Garlic, peanuts, sesame and chiles burn at completely different rates, and this is why they go in and come out separately.
Garlic 3 minutes. Peanuts 4. Sesame 30 seconds. Chiles 90 seconds.
The sesame is the one that catches people out. Half a minute is genuinely all it needs, and burnt sesame will make the entire jar bitter.
No water, ever
This is what makes macha shelf stable for two months without refrigeration. There is nothing in it that bacteria can live in — just oil, dried chiles, toasted nuts and salt.
Which also means: do not add anything fresh. No raw garlic, no herbs, no lime juice, no citrus zest. Any of those turn it into a refrigerator sauce with a two-week life. The vinegar is fine because it is acidic and used in a tiny amount.
Keep it coarse
Short pulses, and stop while there is still visible texture — flecks of chile, pieces of peanut, whole sesame seeds.
Macha blended smooth becomes a chile paste. The pleasure of it is textural: crunchy bits suspended in red oil, which is why it works spooned over things.
The oil has to cover the solids
When you jar it, the solids should settle and the oil should sit visibly above them.
That layer of oil is the seal. If solids are poking above the surface they will oxidize and eventually go rancid, so top it up with more oil if needed.
Milder than it looks
Twenty chiles de árbol sounds alarming and this comes out around level 2.
The capsaicin is spread through a cup and a half of oil and a good amount is absorbed by the peanuts, so the heat is broad and warm rather than sharp. This is a salsa people eat by the spoonful on eggs.
What it goes with
Eggs, first. Grilled meat. Beans. And, entirely outside tradition, on pasta and noodles, where it works exactly as well as chili crisp does.
Keeping it
Sealed glass jar, cupboard, two months — no refrigeration needed. Always a clean dry spoon, since water introduced into the jar is the one thing that will spoil it.
Common questions
How is this different from chili crisp?
It is the same idea and it is older. Salsa macha comes from Veracruz and is documented well before Chinese chili crisp reached most of the world: chiles and seeds preserved in oil, no water, shelf stable. The differences are the chiles — árbol and guajillo rather than Sichuan varieties — and the peanuts, and macha has no Sichuan peppercorn and so no numbing.
Why does it keep two months without refrigeration?
There is no water in it. Bacteria need water, and everything here is oil, toasted nuts and dried chiles. Adding anything fresh — garlic that has not been fried through, herbs, citrus zest — breaks that and turns it into a refrigerator sauce with a much shorter life.
What oil should I use?
A neutral one with a decent smoke point: grapeseed, avocado, sunflower or plain vegetable oil. Not extra virgin olive oil, whose flavor dominates and which behaves badly at these temperatures. Some Veracruz recipes use olive oil and those are made with a light, not extra virgin, oil.
Mine turned bitter.
The chiles or the sesame burned. Sesame is the usual culprit — thirty seconds is genuinely all it takes. Everything comes out of the oil in stages for exactly this reason, because they burn at very different rates.
How hot is it?
Around level 2 — much milder than twenty chiles de árbol suggests. The oil dilutes the capsaicin across a large volume and the peanuts absorb a good deal of it. It is a salsa you can eat by the spoonful, which is the point.