A Veracruz-style chile oil: garlic and mixed nuts fried golden, ancho and árbol chiles flashed in the oil, sesame toasted off the heat, all pulsed with bay, oregano and salt.
Untested: not yet made in this kitchen. It is here for the Peppers and Hot Sauce pages and is adapted from the source named in the Notes.
Ingredients
- 1½ cups vegetable oil
- 5 garlic cloves, peeled
- 1 cup mixed roasted nuts, such as peanuts, pecans and almonds (salted is fine)
- 78 grams ancho chiles (about 5 large), stemmed and seeded
- 7 large chiles de árbol, stemmed
- 2 tablespoons raw sesame seeds
- 2 dried bay leaves, crumbled
- 1 teaspoon dried oregano, preferably Mexican
- 1½ teaspoons kosher salt (such as Diamond Crystal)
Directions
Key ingredients
- Heat the oil, garlic and nuts in a saucepan over medium heat until the garlic is golden, 6 to 8 minutes. Lift the garlic and nuts out with a slotted spoon and let them cool.
- Fry the chiles in the same oil, flipping them, until the oil turns red and the chiles are brick-red, about 30 seconds. Lift them out and let them cool for 5 minutes.
- Take the pan off the heat and add the sesame seeds to the hot oil; they will toast as they sit.
- Pulse the chiles, nuts, garlic, bay leaves, oregano and salt in a food processor until coarse, then stream in the sesame seeds and oil and pulse until finely ground. Jar and refrigerate.
Notes
Source Adapted from Rick A. Martínez, “Salsa Macha,” NYT Cooking (2022, modified 2023). It makes about 2 cups. Martínez calls it “almost like a chile crisp made with toasted Mexican dried chiles, nuts, seeds and herbs.” Ancho and árbol are not the Veracruz chile seco or morita base.
Timing The sesame goes into oil that came off the heat at least 5 minutes earlier, so how much it toasts depends on how quickly it goes in. A second NYT recipe (Tejal Rao, 2020) fries its chiles about 8 minutes on low against this one’s 30 seconds.
Refrigerate it, and why Garlic and other fresh aromatics can carry botulinum spores, and oil shuts out the air those spores need to be kept from, so a garlic-and-oil sauce at room temperature is the textbook botulism hazard (garlic in oil caused outbreaks in Vancouver in 1985 and New York in 1989). The CDC’s advice for homemade oils made with garlic or herbs is to refrigerate them and throw them away after 4 days; UGA Extension gives the same 4 days for non-acidified infused oils. Storage appears only in the source’s headnote (“lasts for months in the refrigerator”), not in the method, and it is not a tested figure. The garlic here is fried golden, which drives off much of its water, but no tested process exists for salsa macha. Keep it refrigerated always.
The dish The Peppers and Hot Sauce section (/hot-sauce/) covers salsa macha and its relationship to chili crisp, and the garlic-in-oil rule.
The photo The photograph shows salsa macha with dried chiles, not this exact recipe.