Why people from Mexico City rave about this Bay Area salsa

Not all salsas are created equal. If you live in San Francisco, you probably love La Corneta’s zesty salsa verde or the smoky, reddish version at Papalote. But there’s a more versatile salsa out there, and it has a fascinating story: salsa macha — an oil-based, tomatoless condiment with seeds for texture and chili peppers chopped into oblivion, like addictive Asian chili crisp.

In Oakland, a husband and wife duo are producing some of the best the Bay Area has to offer. Kuali Salsa’s salsa macha is made using a guarded family recipe that has been passed down for three generations. The brand gets its name from the Nahuatl word “kuali,” which means “bueno, or good.”

“One of the things that I really appreciate is when my friends from Mexico City come to visit, they take a box of our salsa back home with them,” co-owner Rodrigo Cruz said. “They have a hundred different brands [of salsas] in Mexico City, but they still are like, ‘Bro, why is yours so delicious?’”

Kuali Salsa, from Rodrigo and his wife Janeen Cruz, is a salsa company that the pair officially started in 2019, but it really took off in 2020, during the height of the pandemic. Friends and coworkers praised the salsa, but the company took another step when “everyone was glued to their phones” and Janeen used social media to spread the word to a wider audience.

In addition to salsa macha, the Cruzes make a habanero salsa, a Mayan salsa that includes pickled onions and peppers. However, only the salsa macha is available to order for shipping and in certain Bay Area stores because it is shelf-stable. The rest you can purchase in person at their remaining 2023 farmers market appearances, including the Ferry Building on Dec. 9 and the Picnic Holiday Makers Market in Albany on Dec 10.

Rodrigo, who hails from Mexico City, worked for 15 years as a middleman distributor for Mission Foods in Hayward supplying tortillas to stores throughout the bay. But he was always making his mother’s salsas for friends and family. Janeen, a first-generation Mexican American, grew up in the Central Valley, but moved to the Bay Area for nonprofit work. During the lockdown, they decided the time was right to launch the salsa company. The labor-intensive recipe, which they say cannot be shortcutted otherwise it will taste different (they’ve tried), includes a variety of dried chilis that Rodrigo sources locally and is very secretive about. While many versions contain sesame seeds, Kuali’s also has sunflower seeds and roasted pumpkin seeds, which is rare.

“I came home from work one day and told Rodrigo, ‘People said they would pay $20 for the salsa,’” Janeen said. “That night, I sent [my coworkers] an email and I said, ‘fine, we’re doing this.’”

The following year, when many people turned into at-home chefs and were looking for ways to fill their time, Janeen began posting about the salsa macha on social media. Sure enough, within a month, people were buying up their jars.

With Rodrigo helming the blenders, the sourcing of ingredients and his connections from his time as a distributor, along with Janeen’s social media savvy and passion for the product, the two were off and running. They started using a commissary kitchen, with industrial-size blenders, and began stocking the shelves of stores like Market Hall in Oakland and Reem’s California in San Francisco. Their salsa has been a hit ever since.

As for how to eat salsa macha, it can be paired with anything — especially if you like heat. Rodrigo likes it on eggs, or in a quesadilla with Oaxaca cheese. Janeen loves to drizzle it in pho. Salsa macha had a moment in 2020, when the New York Times named it “The most valuable condiment of 2020,” and now it is more common to find in supermarkets or specialty stores. When asked to divulge their recipe, the Cruzes deflected with a hearty laugh.

“That’s the number one question we get,” Janeen said. “It’s Rodrigo’s mom’s recipe, we really guard that with everything.”

Salsa macha is often credited as originating in Orizaba, Veracruz, Mexico. The indigenous Totonac people would mix dried chilis, sesame seeds and salt and grind them into a paste using a molcajete. It is unknown when exactly the oil was added to the recipe, perhaps from cross-continental trade linking Chinese chili oils to Mesoamerica, but in Janeen and Rodrigo’s experience selling their salsa macha, it seems there might be a global influence.

“The one thing that’s been really fascinating is we have a lot of international customers and so we’ve been hearing about the different chili oils within their own country, whether it’s India, whether it’s Africa,” Janeen said. “That’s really made me think, like, ‘Wow, it feels like each country kind of has their own version of it.’”

For Rodrigo, though, the influence is purely from one person: his late mother, Mely, who passed away seven years ago and never got to see the salsa business take off. Rodrigo said even as a kid, he remembers his mom bringing tacos and her salsa to the post-football (soccer) parties.

“She always brought a bowl of salsa and tacos for my friends,” Rodrigo said. “She was, like, famous.”