Homemade Salsa

8/15/2012

Homemade Salsa

Last weekend Jeff made his homemade, fresh salsa.  Now folks this is not necessarily a cost saving venture.  The produce places aren't exactly giving away peppers, onions, garlic and tomatoes - and you need a lot of tomatoes. The taste, however, is amazing.

The salsa starts with tomatoes and at the produce place Jeff buys a lug of "seconds".  These tomatoes aren't quite pretty enough to sell on their own so they're coupled together with their own kind and they are perfect for canning or cooking.  By the way, a lug is just short of a bushel so we're talking a lot of tomatoes.  Next up, peppers, chilies, onions and garlic.  Jeff selects from whatever is available: jalapeno, banana, chili, haberno, serrano and anything else that is for sale.  A virtual mix of heat.

First you must boil the tomatoes so that you can peel the skins off.  Drop or plop them in hot water and in mere seconds their peel cracks and then you plunge them into cold water.  At this point, peeling is easy - messy - but easy.  After you have peeled ALL those tomatoes then you remove the stem, cut them up and run them piece by piece through the big mixer with the attachment that turns the tomatoes into mush.  Now there is a BIG bowl of tomato mush that is poured through a strainer TWICE to remove as much as liquid as possible.  All of this prep work is very messy - aprons are a necessity - and while the clean up may be long it's easy to spot all the red that has to be wiped up.

While myself or another unsuspecting helper is doing the tomato work, Jeff has donned gloves and has opened and scraped away the inside from all the peppers and chilies.  The kitchen by this point reeks of peppers and you are afraid to touch your eye.  Onions (lots) and garlic (also lots) are ground up as are the peppers.  Then with the use of another big bowl Jeff combines the tomatoes with the other ingredients, adds a bit of vinegar for acid, some sugar, cilantro and salt and stirs.

The result?  A very fresh, no preservative added salsa.  At this point after putting the salsa in quart jars you could go through the whole canning process which we did for many years.  This involves putting the jars in a hot water bath for 30 minutes or so to prevent that ugly little thing called botulism to appear.  The two times this summer that we have made salsa, we have simply put it in jars and put them in the fridge immediately.  By the time we give away a quart or two, there is very little reason to can the remaining jars and they never seem to stick around very long anyway.  The salsa is obviously great with chips, on top of chicken or fish or if you're a true lover of salsa as Jeff is, just straight from the jar.

What we have also done is taken some tomatoes and after peeling and removing the stems, put them on cookie sheets and froze them whole.  After they were frozen we put them in freezer bags for this winter.  While you will never be able to slice the tomatoes to serve at the dinner table - they will make a wonderful fresh addition to spaghetti sauces, soups, stews, etc. this winter.  So if you want fresh tomatoes, this process of getting them ready to freeze is not too time consuming and relatively easy.  I highly recommend it.

Jeff LOVES making salsa, and the fruits of labor are always shared with volunteers.  If you find yourself craving something fresh, spicy and excellent, then give Jeff a call.  All you have to do is suggest that you have free time and would love to make salsa - you'll be hired.

Enjoy a bowl of salsa and chips - it's a party.  Come over any time.

P