Making Salsa from Homegrown Tomatoes

According to This Link salsa surpassed ketchup as America's favorite condiment back in 2006.  Growing up we always ate ketchup on everything.  That's changed now and to be honest, unless we eat at a fast food restaurant (which is rare) and get fries, I never eat ketchup and can't even tell you the last time I ate it.  Salsa is just SO much better to me, with the spice, the heat, the onions.

So with the bumper crop of tomatoes and a dwindling supply of last year's salsa in the pantry, we figured we'd put up some salsa this weekend.  Here's how we did it:

First you start with the fruit of the vine.  No, the other fruit of the vine, the tomato from the tomato vine.  Pull a bunch of vine ripened tomatoes off the vine and bring them inside.

Vine Ripened Tomato

We use the recipe below and you can see it has been well-used with smudges of tomato sauce and other ingredients on it.  The yield is 16-18 pints using 7 quarts of tomatoes, but we adjust the proportions of the ingredients based on the amount of tomatoes we have.  You can see those adjusted proportions written on either side. One thing that we omitted from the recipe this year was oregano.  While we love oregano in Italian dishes, we just didn't like the way it altered the flavor of the salsa. We also substituted Criolla Sella peppers for the long green chilies since that's what we have on hand.

The Salsa recipe we use

After removing the skins from the tomatoes and coring them, we assemble all the other ingredients.

Most of the ingredients prepped for mixing together

We chop up the tomatoes, saving the juices.

Fresh chopped tomatoes

We combine all the ingredients in a big pot, except for the cumin and cilantro, and stir together to mix it all up well.  Then we turn up the heat.

Once it boils, we turn down the heat and let it simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes, while stirring every few minutes.  We doubled the cooking times as we are desiring a thicker salsa and want some of the liquid to boil off, yielding a chunkier, more intensely flavored salsa.

Simmering Salsa

While that's on the stove top, we washed some jars, gaskets, lids, and rings in warm, soapy water.  We'll be using wide mouth pint jars and we're breaking it up in two separate batches since our canner will only handle 8 wide mouth jars.

Canning supplies clean & ready

After 20 minutes of simmering after the boil has been reached, we ladle the hot salsa into the pint jars.

Filling the jars

We measure to ensure we're leaving 1/2 inch of head space and then we wipe the rim clean and affix our Tattler gasket to the top of the jar. 

Measuring and putting the gasket on top

Then we put the plastic Tattler lid on the top of the jar.  Tattler lids and gaskets are reusable!

Tattler lid on the jar

Now we screw the ring on finger-tip tight, according to the Tattler website: LINK  

Put the bands on, "Finger-tip tight"

Then lower the jars into your water bath canner and bring the water to a boil.  

Things are heating up...

We put the lid loosely on top of the canner to achieve the boil and allow the salsa to process for 15 minutes.

Salsa is processing in the water bath canner

Once 15 minutes has passed we use our canning tongs to remove the jars from the canner.  We immediately tighten the metal band firmly as soon as they're out of the water.  Tip: Use a dishrag so you don't burn your hands!  We then allow them to cool and come to room temperature.

Allowing the salsa to cool

We had a little bit left in the bottom of the pot that wasn't enough to put in another jar.  Oh, what to do?  What to do?  I know.  We'll eat it!

Freshly processed salsa (not from New York City!)

Here's the verdict:  Delicious!  Substituting the criolla sellas for the green chillies seemed to make this batch a lot hotter than the last one we did and that's okay, because we like hot stuff.  The flavor, seasonings and spices were perfect.  If I could change one thing I might allow to simmer 15 minutes longer to make it a little thicker, but that's just my preference as I like to use the chip as a SCOOP or a SPOON to transport this heavenly concoction to my mouth!

I don't dip my chip.  I use it as a shovel.

When the dust cleared on Saturday, we stacked up 12 pints of homemade salsa to accompany all the stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce in the pantry.  The tomato crop is starting to slow down now, so we'll eat the rest fresh and we'll also blanch and freeze some whole.  Opening a jar of salsa and eating chips and salsa while sitting around the island in the kitchen is enjoyable time and is a relatively healthy snack!