You say tomato,
we say dohmado.

Dohmado is finally here. We make it in super small batches in central California using only the freshest tomatoes. It’s a salsa. It’s a sauce. It’s a spoonful of umami when you need a little somethin’. It’s a dollop-it-on-everything situation. It’s still sort of a secret. And still very, very special.

Photographs by Julia Stotz
Props by Ruth Kim

It all started with an old episode of a TV show. That’s where our dad saw the host make a salsa that piqued his interest. He recorded it on VHS, then rewound and rewatched as he developed the recipe. When it was right, he started serving it alongside the breakfast burritos our parents made at their unassuming snack shack in a Pasadena medical building. The salsa, however, was anything but unassuming. Its punchy flavor is full of umami, and somehow leans slightly Asian, with an incredibly delicious taste that’s hard to pinpoint. In Korean we call it sohn-mat, the taste of the hand.

Our dad retired, and the snack shack closed, but we still begged him to make us this special salsa. A few years ago, we started jarring it and giving it to friends as gifts. We sold it at a couple of maker fairs just for fun. The response was overwhelming. Friends wanted to get jars between holiday seasons. Strangers asked where they could reup. But they couldn’t! Until now…