Around Spanish, salsa can refer to any nature and severity of sauce, but within English it usually refers to the spicy, typically tomato-depending sauces average of Latin American cuisine, particularly uncooked sauces or dips.

Salsa is the Spanish word for sauce, from Latin salsa of the same meaning, from either sal, "salt"; "saline" & "salad" are related words. These are ordinarily pronounced IPA .

Easily-known salsas: Salsa roja, "red sauce": utilized as a condiment around Mexican and southwestern U.S. cuisine, and usually made with tomatoes, chile peppers, onion, garlic, and fresh cilantro (coriander leaves). Salsa cruda ("raw sauce"), as well referred to as pico de gallo ("rooster's beak"), salsa mexicana ("Mexican sauce") or even salsa fresca ("fresh sauce"): manufactured by using raw tomatoes, lime fluids, chile peppers, onions, & more coarsely sliced raw ingredients. In the United States, this is typically upright known as salsa. Salsa verde, "green sauce": manufactured by using tomatillos. Sauces processed using tomatillos come normally cooked. Salsa brava, "wild sauce": commonly processed of the mayonnaise-Tabasco mix. In top of potato wedges, it makes a dish patatas bravas, average of tapas blocks around Catalonia. Guacamole: usually any sauce in which a independent ingredient is avocado. Mole (pronounced MOE-lay ): a Mexican sauce made from either chile peppers mixed with spices, unsweetened chocolate, peanuts, and more ingredients.

There are several more salsas, two traditional & nouveau: for example, a select few come processed using mint, pineapple, or mango.

Health issues
Care should become taken in the preparation & storage of salsa due to the fact that numbers of raw-served varieties could help as a practiced incubation medium for possibly unsafe bacterium, especially whilst unrefrigerated. Around 2002 the survey appearing in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, conducted per University of Texas-Houston Medical School, obtained that 66% of the sauces tested (71 samples tested, sauces existence either: salsa, guacamole, or even pico de gallo) from either eating house inside Guadalajara, Jalisco, and 40% of those from either Houston, Texas, were contaminated with E. coli bacteria. the investigator noticed that a Mexican sauces from either either Guadalajara other ofttimes contained feculent contamination & higher levels of the bacterium than victims of the sauces from Houston, possibly as a symptom of supplementary green improper refrigeration of the Mexican sauces.