A mango salad is a tradition that is mostly done in the summer. It’s derived from the Caribbean and the black culture. For Miamians no one questions what a mango salad is or how it came to be.
But this summer we discovered that our instructor Ms. Wilson Sayre had never eaten a mango salad. Ms. Wilson is from North Carolina and mangos don’t really grow there.
One day we were offered a plain sliced mango, with the skin still attached, to eat, but no one went for it. It was then that Ms. Wilson noticed something was wrong.
“No one eats mangos?” she asked, we replied asking “Do you have vinegar?” There was confusion in the air, due to Ms. Wilson never having eaten a mango salad. At that moment we all became persistent to turning Ms. Wilson into a Miami Girl.
Listen to our interview with WLRN reporter Wilson Sayre on perfecting the mango salad.
THE TRANSFORMATION
In order to continue our transformational journey, we had to buy the perfect mangos. Luckily, we have an advantage because right now it’s mango season. Mango season starts in the middle of May and ends in August.
Picking the perfect mango is important because when mixing the ingredients together the mangos won’t become soggy and mushy. The perfect mango consists of a mixture of red for ripeness, green for hardness, and yellow for sweetness.
Normally those mangos come from our neighbors’ trees. But that day, we headed to Publix in downtown Miami to find that perfect mango. We selected four mangos and headed back to the WLRN breakroom to start Ms. Wilson’s transformation.
THE RECIPE
The necessary ingredients are as follows: vinegar, salt, pepper, and hot sauce (optional). After picking the mangos, first you have to wash them under cold water to scrub off any excess dirt. Then, you peel the skin off in the direction that is away from your body, to avoid injuring yourself. Finally, you cut the mangos into banana slices to put them into a suitable plastic container. After adding each ingredient, you shake the mixture around four times.
The procedure is as follows:
- Adding vinegar to cover half of the mangos
- Adding salt (make sure to not let a heavy-handed person pour the salt, or that will be the only thing that you taste)
- Adding pepper (same note as above)
CONTROVERSY
The biggest controversy when making a mango salad is whether to add hot sauce. Hot sauce adds a spicy flavor to the sweetness of the mango. Two out of six of us agreed to liking the mango salad with hot sauce, while the others argued that it was too hot and spicy and burned their throats. The question was whether friends let friends hot sauce, and the majority answer was “no.”
After all the ingredients were mixed together, ours and our instructors’ stomachs growled. We filled four cups of mangos, two with hot sauce and the other two with the necessary ingredients.
FINAL RESULTS
We asked Ms. Wilson to taste test both the mango salads while blindfolded. She agreed that she liked the cup with hot sauce.
The final product looked succulent, beaming with a bright yellow. It smelled delicious and tempting to eat, the taste was sweet but sour, giving the taste buds a ting.
“I eat a lot of pickles, I’m from North Carolina, we pickle a lot of things, and it tastes like Miami’s pickle,” Ms. Wilson said. “This is Miami’s pickle.”
And now Ms. Wilson is an official Miami Girl.
A video posted by WLRN Public Media (@wlrn) on Jul 21, 2015 at 9:35am PDT
This piece is a production of WLRN Youth Radio Institute, which is a part of Urgent, Inc's F.A.C.E. Summer Youth Training Employment Program. Click here to see more work from the institute.
