Some salsas are bright and lively, meant to wake everything up.

And then there are the ones that feel deeper—darker, warmer, built slowly, the kind that fill the kitchen with that unmistakable scent of toasted chiles and tomatoes softening on the stove.

This is that kind of salsa.

It’s smooth and spoonable like a table salsa, but the flavor leans roasted and savory, with ancho chile bringing gentle warmth and a quiet smokiness that never overwhelms. It’s not meant to set your mouth on fire. It’s meant to give you that deep, beautiful chile flavor that makes you wonder how something so simple can completely change a meal.

Learning to use dried chiles was actually a breakthrough for me in the kitchen.

For years, I assumed dried Mexican chiles simply weren’t going to be something I could use because I am so sensitive to spicy food. I love Mexican flavors, but when heat takes over, I can no longer taste all the other beautiful things happening in the dish.

Then I discovered ancho chiles.

That opened a whole new door in my kitchen.

Ancho is the dried form of a ripe poblano pepper, and it has this wonderful deep, almost fruity, earthy flavor with relatively gentle heat. It gives you so much of what I love about dried chile sauces without requiring the kind of heat I simply don’t enjoy.

So ancho became one of the dried chiles I reach for most often.

I also love dried pasilla chiles, another one I can usually work with when I’m building Mexican-inspired sauces. Once I understood that dried chiles weren’t all about heat—that they could bring fruitiness, smokiness, earthiness, sweetness, and extraordinary depth—I began experimenting with them in an entirely different way.

Suddenly I wasn’t trying to make food spicy.

I was using chiles to make food flavorful.

And there is a very big difference.

Maybe part of my affection for those flavors comes from the time I’ve spent in Mexico.

All of my early trips there were because of golf. Before I turned professional, I played in the Mexican National Amateur Championship—and happened to win it the first year I played.

So Mexico has always held a fond place in my memories.

And, naturally, wherever I traveled, I wanted to know what people ate.

It was in Mexico that I began to understand just how different traditional Mexican food could be from much of the Mexican food I had known in the United States. There were salsas everywhere, and they weren’t all the same red sauce in a different bowl. Different chiles. Different textures. Some fresh. Some roasted. Some cooked. Some wonderfully simple and others incredibly complex.

Of course, I also managed to experience the less romantic side of travel in Mexico: the infamous Montezuma’s revenge.

I can confirm from personal experience that you do not want that particular souvenir.

Lol.

But it didn’t diminish my love of the food.

If anything, tasting all those different salsas made me want to come home and start figuring them out myself.

That has become part of the way I cook. I taste something I love, become curious about what makes it taste the way it does, learn something about the tradition behind it, and then begin experimenting in my own kitchen.

I want to honor where a dish came from while still making something I can actually eat and enjoy.

And for me, that often means turning down the heat without turning down the flavor.

This salsa is a perfect example.

The ancho chile is really the star. It takes an otherwise simple tomato salsa somewhere deeper and smokier, giving it that unmistakable dried-chile character without overpowering everything around it.

It settles beautifully into tacos. Spoon it over rice or grain bowls. Pour a little over a tostada. Serve it alongside warm tortillas. Or put a bowl of it in front of me with some really good organic corn chips and there’s a good chance I won’t need much else.

It can also be lovely with American-style enchiladas when you want something lighter and more tomato-forward.

But I want to make an important distinction here.

This is not meant to replace a true dried-chile sauce—the kind built from several dried peppers and slowly developed for enchiladas and other deeply savory dishes.

This salsa merely borrows a little of that world.

It remains very much a tomato-based table salsa: softer, brighter, spoonable, and made for everyday meals.

And if you love heat more than I do, make it yours.

Add a hotter chile. Add more chile. Play with the balance until it tastes exactly right to you.

That’s one of the things I hope my recipes do. I don’t want them only to tell you what I made. I hope occasionally they open a new door in your kitchen, the way discovering ancho chiles opened one in mine.

Learn the basic idea.

Taste.

Adjust.

Get curious.

And eventually the recipe becomes yours.

Because a bowl of homemade salsa sitting on the table, surrounded by warm tortillas, tacos, tostadas, or simply a handful of good corn chips, doesn’t need to be complicated to make a meal feel special.

Sometimes all it takes is one little dried chile to completely change what you thought was possible.

And to me, that’s a small, beautiful thing.