home canned salsa

This makes a mild salsa, thick with tomatoes.  I heat everything up in my 12 quart, heavy bottom stainless steel pot.  It doesn’t need to be cooked, per se, but it should be steaming hot when you pack it into jars. Dice the seasonings fairly fine, about 1/8 inch cubes, either with a food chopper or by hand.  I tried both the vinegar and lemon options, but I like the flavor of the vinegar better.  The original recipe used cilantro instead of parsley, but my parsley grows well and my cilantro doesn’t, so I use what I have on hand.  I generally skip the cumin.  I make no claims as to this being “authentic” salsa.  I’m of predominantly Eastern European descent and have lived in the Upper Midwest all my life, so I haven’t got a clue.  My family and I (and our friends) like it, so it works for us. 

 Ingredients

Tomatoes – about 20 lbs, skinned, seeded

3 cups chopped onions	1 Tablespoons of oregano
2 cloves of garlic, minced	1 cup diced assorted mild peppers (red, yellow, orange, banana, whatever you have)
1/4 cup diced, fresh parsley	1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 cup diced celery	1 to 4 diced jalapeno peppers
1 tablespoon sea salt	3 (6 oz) cans of tomato paste
1 cup 5% apple cider vinegar	Optional: 1 Tablespoon ground cumin Optional:  1/4 cup Clearjel

Blanch and skin the tomatoes.  Put them in boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds, until the skins start to split.  If you put a little nick in the skin with a knife before you drop them in the water, the skin will split faster, avoiding overcooking and keeping them from turning into mush.

After the skins start to split, fish out the tomatoes and put them in cold water.  Once the tomatoes are cool enough to handle, put child labor (if available) to work slipping off their skins while you continue blanching the rest.

Squeeze the tomatoes and toss into a colander or drainer, while you work on others. This helps more of the water to drain off.  You may want to save the liquid: if you then pass it through a sieve, screen or cheesecloth, you have fresh tomato juice; great to drink cold or use in cooking!  Next chop them up into roughly 1/2 inch size cubes.  The boys were doing a lot of the chopping, so heaven only knows what size those chunks were, but it works.

Mix ingredients in the pot and bring the sauce to a gentle simmer

Start with the chopped tomatoes in the pot.

Add the seasonings and bring to a gentle simmer, just to get it hot – there’s no need to cook it; only to get it hot enough to ready it for water bath processing to kill any bacteria and enzymes.

Taste it as it cooks. If you like the sauce hotter, add 1 Teaspoon of chili powder.  Here’s a shot of the wicked pepper.  Sorry for the photo quality – the camera is showing its age.

I save the hot pepper as the last thing to be cut up, being careful not to cross-contaminate my cutting board.  I wear gloves and minimize handling, using my knife to manipulate the pepper on the cutting board and to scrape it into the salsa.

For a thicker salsa, add 1/4 cup Clear Jel (which is ultrafine cornstarch), dissolved in the vinegar before adding to the mix.  When I first made this recipe, Clear Jel was not available.  It is now the preferred product for thickening when canning.

Fill the jars with sauces and put the lid and rings on

Fill them to within 1/4 inch of the top, seat the lid and hand-tighten the ring around them.

Boil the jars in the canner

Put them in the canner and keep them covered with at least 1 inch of water. Keep the water boiling. Process the jars in a boiling-water bath for 15 minutes for 8 oz and pints and 20 minutes for quarts. If you have a pressure canner, use it and process the sauce for 10 minutes for pint jars and 15 minutes for quarts, at a pressure of 10 to 11 pounds.  Makes around 12-13 pints.

Ta-da!  A tasty batch of salsa to enjoy throughout the year that tastes a lot like a very popular national brand which shall remain unmentioned here since I don’t want to get sued.