Salsa Borracha de Pasilla y Mezcal

This is a Oaxacan salsa. Specifically, it belongs to the Sierra Mixe and the valleys around it, where the pasilla mixe is grown on small plots and dried over wood fires by farmers whose families have been doing it for generations. The chile is the recipe. Without it, you are making a different salsa.

A word about the chile, because most cooks outside Mexico get this wrong. The pasilla you find at the supermarket, the long wrinkled black one, is the chilaca dried, grown in the central highlands. It is a fine chile and it has no business in this salsa. Pasilla oaxaqueño, also called pasilla mixe, is shorter, wider at the shoulder, brick-red rather than black, and it carries the smoke of the wood fire it was dried over. Open the bag and the kitchen smells like a Oaxacan campo. If your chile does not smell like that, you have the wrong chile. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs entirely to Oaxaca.

The mezcal is the second half of the equation. The salsa is called borracha, drunk, because it is laced with mezcal joven and the alcohol is what carries the smoke through the salsa. Use real mezcal from a small Oaxacan palenque. The kind that comes in a clay copita, not the kind that comes with a worm and a marketing campaign. The smoke of the pasilla mixe and the smoke of a good espadin are cousins, and the whole salsa is built on that conversation between them.

This is the salsa that sits next to barbacoa de chivo at the long Sunday tables in Tlacolula. It is the salsa that comes out at mezcal-pairing meals at the small comedores around Mitla. It is not a dipping salsa for chips. It is not a casual condiment. It is built to live next to slow-cooked goat or grilled meat, with hot tortillas and a copita of the same mezcal that went into the pot. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.