Salsa de Chile Pasilla Oaxaqueño

This salsa is from the Sierra Mixe, in the highlands of Oaxaca, where the chile pasilla oaxaqueño grows and is dried over oak smoke until it carries the flavor of the fire that made it. The chile is endemic. It is grown almost nowhere else, and the small producers in San Juan Cotzocon and Santa Maria Tlahuitoltepec sell most of their harvest to the cooks of Oaxaca City, who turn it into the salsa that anchors every serious Oaxacan table.

First, settle this: the chile pasilla you find in most US markets is not this chile. That one is the dried chilaca, long, black, smooth, faintly raisiny. It is from central Mexico and it is a fine chile for its own purposes. Pasilla oaxaqueño is shorter, wrinkled, brick-red to deep brown, and it carries the smoke of the oak fires it was dried over. The two share a name and almost nothing else. If your salsa does not taste of smoke, you have the wrong chile.

The technique is the technique. You toast briefly on a comal, soak in hot water, char the tomate and garlic on that same comal, and grind everything in a molcajete. Not a blender, if you can help it. The volcanic stone breaks the chile differently. The salsa stays coarse, the texture catches on the tortilla, and you taste each ingredient instead of a smooth puree where everything dissolves into the same note.

My notebook has a page from a senora at the Mercado 20 de Noviembre in Oaxaca City who sold me chiles for three years before she would tell me her ratio. Eight chiles, four tomates, three garlic, salt, manteca if you want it on a tlayuda, no manteca if it is for memelas. She wrote it on a torn corner of butcher paper. I keep it pinned above my comal. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.