Date Tested: February 9th, 2020

Competitors: Homemade, Matteo’s, Pace Picante, Tostitos Restaurant Style, Mrs. Renfro’s Habanero, Desert Pepper

Test Description: Blind test, set up by third party – Unmarked containers each pre-filled. Tester may eat out of each in whatever order and render a brand guess and/or rating. Standard tortilla ships were used a vehicle for the salsa.

This test was a long time coming. Who doesn’t love salsa? Surprisingly, despite going to multiple stores, the above brands were really all I could find that were a red salsa and not what i’d consider Pico de Gallo. I am a big fan of salsa. It is an ideal snack and works well for many moods and cravings. It goes with a lot of stuff and is a great foil to mu other favorite snack: cheese and aged meats. Salsa is also a category in which I never had any brand loyalty – I simply grabbed whichever jar on the shelf looked most like what I’d find in a Mexican restaurant.

The obvious winner here is Matteo’s. It was the highest scoring and most consistently highest rated. There were a few salsa’s hot in it’s tail though: Mrs. Renfro’s Habanero Salsa and Tostitos Restaurant Style. However, what this test doesn’t fully capture is volume scaling. The first chip-full of salsa may be great, but how does it rank 10 chips in? Tostitos for instance, Ive noticed, gets very watery very quickly. As you work your way towards the bottom of the bottle, the taste seems to mellow out and the ingredients seem to separate from each other with anything less than constant mixing. Mrs. Renfro’s starts off really strong; your first chip will taste fresh, powerful, and delicious. However, seemingly the next bite, you loose a lot of that punch, and unfortunately that pattern continues with each subsequent bite. It seems to me that something about this salsa just diminishes with time, its flavor becomes less severe, less tangy, and less flavorful to the point I no longer want to eat it after a dozen chip-fulls. Matteo’s conversely doesn’t have these issues at all. Consistency remains the same no matter your progress into the jar and each bite is as delicious as the first. I should also mention that despite the Homemade salsa’s poor performance (4), there is significant potential here. This particular batch was super heavy on onions and large tomato chunks – two things I don’t particularly care for. It was also quite watery, which I believe was just an error in production, seeing as this was our first foray into salsa making. Fixing these things could easily see this salsa rise to 7/8, and with fine tuning, maybe even higher.

For the reasons above, Matteo’s is my current salsa brand of choice. But, this may not forever be the case. Matteo’s scored only an 8. I know I’ve had 9 and 10/10 salsa before, I just never took note of suppliers. I just have to find it again. It seems to me that nearly every Mexican restaurant has at least 9/10 salsa, but maybe there is a lot of environment working its way into that score and it wouldn’t perform as well next to juggernauts like Tostitos and Matteo’s. Maybe those little stone bowls they give you just add that x-factor. My point is, while I currently always reach for Matteo’s salsa, my mouth yearns and search continues for the perfect salsa…