Fresh, lively, and super easy, pico makes just about everything better. Sprinkled on top of rich dishes it adds lightness and pop, eaten with chips as a lovely snack, or used inside of cooked foods to add a little extra something something. This comes together in minutes, or, if your knife skills aren’t quite up there yet, a few minutes longer. (also, if you’re in a rush, you can rough chop everything and use a food processor, but it’s much harder to get nice looking pico that way.)
Just a few simple ingredients, tomatoes, jalapeno (or bell pepper if you don’t like heat, or serrano if you like more), onion, cilantro, lime (or lemon if you prefer), salt, and a tiny bit of garlic. That’s all it takes folks. A little trick i like to use, especially if serving this straight away, is to mash the garlic with the salt and allow it to infuse in the juice while i’m cutting everything else up. Also, if you’re going to be using this more as a salsa, i suggest refrigerating overnight, it will pull out more juices and soften things a little, making it more chip friendly and less likely to go tumbling about everywhere. I highly suggest not keeping this for more than a day or two, it really loses it’s freshness and just isn’t the same, though still immensely better than anything you’re going to buy premade.
Look! Hands! In Food! yup, use your hands for this people, it’s a lot easier to get everything mixed up nicely and it let’s you connect with your food. connect. connect. connect.
One last note, there are different amounts of salt and juice recommended for eating fresh and right away, versus later. If you were to use the lower amount and put it in the fridge, when you pull it out it will seem quite bland as the juices have had time to come out of the vegges. On the flip side, if you used the higher amount and ate straight away, it will seem overly tart and salty.
Now, go pico!