open-source salsa
My local food co-operative Wheatsville has a “Salsa of the Month.” As the name might suggest, it’s a home-made salsa they offer for a month before moving on to a different recipe. This month’s salsa is cucumber-lime, and it is, to quote “Lazy Sunday,” crazy delicious. Well, except that I like my salsa quite a bit spicier, so I’d swap out the poblano peppers for serrano peppers and add a little more cilantro.
Last summer, Wheatsville had a great ancho pepper salsa with roasted red (bell) peppers. I’d hoped they would release the recipe when the month ended, but my hopes were dashed when July rolled around. I assumed that they kept the recipe secret because they’d offer the ancho salsa again this summer, but again my hopes were dashed.
I’m pretty confident I could bust out the blender and develop my own cucumber-lime salsa, but I’m pretty clueless about the ancho salsa. So I’m proposing Wheatsville “open source” their salsa-of-the-month recipes so stakeholders can recreate their salsas at home or offer their own modifications and bug-fixes. This seems like it would be in the spirit of community good that Wheatsville espouses and could create superior, enterprise-grade salsas. Moreover, the copyright status of recipes is dubious at best. The Copyright Office says that lists of ingredients and proportions are not copyrightable. I don’t think this would threaten Wheatsville’s business: making salsa is kind of a hassle, so plenty of members would continue to buy salsa instead of spending the time to make their own.
If you look at Wheatsville’s web site, you’ll see they’re still catching up with Web 1.0, but a Wheatsville wiki could be a potentially fruitful project. In addition to sharing salsa-of-the-month recipes, members could use the wiki for sharing information on how to use products like quinoa whose application is not emminently obvious to newbies, the benefits of that yummy (trust me on this one) nutritional yeast, or the never-ending paper-vs-plastic debate.
1 Comment
[...] While not really an open-source salsa recipe (it is much too basic), this is what I made this weekend, now that Central Market has their roasted green chiles from Hatch, New Mexico in stock. [...]