Salsa brava (spicy dipping sauce)

Hello again! Can you believe it's June already? It feels like yesterday we were celebrating Christmas, and here we are now, halfway through the year. This baby blog has just turned 6 months, and although it doesn't have many readers yet, I'm quite happy with what I've achieved so far. I can't believe I have managed to post consistently for 6 months!

For this month's recipe, I didn't want to do something too complicated, nor a very heavy dish. Summer is almost upon us, so I don't think it's time to write about hot stews and heavy meals. So, instead I decided to some typical Spanish sauce called salsa brava. This spicy sauce is often used in a dish called patatas bravas or papas bravas, which is a very popular side dish or tapa that consists in fried potatoes and a spicy sauce. This dish is pretty popular all around Spain and has several variants, but it originated in Madrid, in the center of Spain. 

I don't make this sauce very often, just here and there when I'm planning to have some fried potatoes a couple of days in a row. But I wanted to make something different this month, so I just planned out my weekly meals around this recipe, so I could create some content and make some use of the sauce.

I wanted to do some research before writing this post, to find which was the "original" or "authentic" salsa brava recipe, but much to my surprise, there's no consensus. I've seen as many variants as recipes I've read online, so there's not such a thing as the "authentic" recipe. Probably the original dish evolved in different ways,  depending on the area. There were a few ingredients that were common amongst all recipes though, which could be considered the base, but the others are optional. So far, these are the ingredients that we normally use.

Ingredients:

• 1 onion.
• 1 garlic clover.
• 1/2 red bell pepper
• 1/4 green bell pepper or 1/2 Italian pepper
• 1 or 2 teaspoons of sweet paprika
• 1 or 2 teaspoons of spicy paprika
• A glass of water or stock. 
• Corn starch or flour (to thicken it).
• Vinegar or ketchup. 
• Chili powder (optional). 
• Concentrated tomato (optional). 

Across all the recipes I've found, the common ingredients were onion, garlic, powder paprika, water or stock and flour. The other ingredients varied a lot between one recipe and another. So, from those ingredients, you can make your own custom sauce recipe and tailor it to your taste.

We start by dicing the green and red pepper into rather small cuts. I also chopped the onion and the garlic, because it's easier for me to cut all the ingredients beforehand. 

Cook it in a pan with some olive oil.

Once the pepper has cooked for around 5 minutes, add the onion and the  garlic.

Once the onion is well cooked (you'll see it changes color) add two teaspoons of paprika. You can combine them the way you want: two of sweet, two of spicy, or one of each. Tailor it to your taste. We decided to go with two teaspoons of sweet pepper.

And here you have to be quick and stir it, because if you burn the paprika you'll get a nasty taste. Lower the heat of your stove to avoid this. We also added 1/3 of a teaspoon of powder chili. 

I am aware that this photo is bad. I'll try to replace it later on

I mixed some cornstarch in a glass of water and poured it into our mix to thicken the sauce. You can also sprinkle some flour, stir it, and then add the water or stock. You can also add some concentrated tomato if you want to, but that's completely optional.  

Let the sauce thicken for a couple of minutes and then, it's ready to go. It's also a good moment to add some salt. 

Now that everything is cooked, it is time to blend our sauce. Add more salt if needed. 

And this is what we have. This orange color is the color this sauce should have. Some bars here put some ketchup with a drop of a spicy sauce and call it a day, but that's not a traditional salsa brava.

Ours is not very spicy, but it has rather a sweet taste at first, with the spicy flavor building up as you eat. Since we made this on a weekday, we tried to keep it mild, I try not to eat very spicy things during weekdays. Usually, for this sauce, potatoes are cut in cubes, but we decided to cut them french fries style instead. 

That's all I have to share for today. As for my next post, I don't know what I will do. I'm feeling quite uninspired with this blog and not very motivated to post. I run another blog (my main one), and I sometimes feel like this one is taking time that I could be spending working on content for said blog. Maybe I'll take a month off, and try to come back later in August, or try to figure out shorter post formats that don't require as much time to write. 

As always, thank you so much for reading me, I appreciate me. Let me know what do you think of this salsa brava in the comment section down below. Will you be making your own version?

M.C