Making Fresh Salsa from the Garden

BEFORE GOING IN THE OVEN

Of course, there are MANY kinds of salsa! But what I am writing about here is your everyday (in Texas) red table salsa that is ordinarily enjoyed with tortilla chips. Over the years I have been experimenting with different ways to make red table salsa, and I am pretty happy with this recipe.

You will need:

Garden tomatoes, any size is fine (you can use cherry tomatoes if that is what you have); roughly a small mixing bowl full. How many is that? A pound? Three pounds? I don’t know. I used 4 giant ones (Cherokees) and 6 medium ones (San Marzanos).

One gigantic white onion

Jalapenos, or serranos, or poblanos, or you could even use a single habanero if you are brave. How many? depends on how hot you want it to be. I used three jalapenos, hot ones. (If you don’t have fresh, you can use canned, but the salsa will taste different.)

Some of that frozen cilantro I told you about. Or fresh. One thing I have noticed is that STORE cilantro is way less leafy that homegrown; if you use storebought, you will need to use the leaves off a whole bunch, an ENTIRE bunch.

Deflated and roasted, they are ready for the PROCESSOR!!!

salt and pepper

sugar

a lime

a little oil

Heat the oven to 400˚.  Arrange halved tomatoes, onion slices, and whole peppers on two oiled baking sheets. Salt and pepper them. Roast in the oven until they appear deflated and more than half cooked. They can still be a LITTLE raw. Between fifteen and thirty minutes? You can tell by looking at them. (Or, you can roast them until they are beginning to blacken a little; then you will have “FIRE-ROASTED” salsa!)

Remove from oven, and dump the tomatoes, onion, and peppers into your food processor. (Have you noticed my recipes involve the word “DUMP” a lot? I think I am trying to make this all seem NOT FINICKY to you guys. Cooking can be very loose, very relaxed! You don’t need to be UPTIGHT about MEASURING STUFF!)

Pulse. Add a Tablespoon or two of white sugar, a HALF teaspoon of SALT, and the juice of half a lime. Pulse. Taste. Does it need more sugar? (It will if your tomatoes were sour, the way we grow them around here! Tomatoes that grow in areas where it gets chilly at night are SWEET; in Texas, where it is HOT at night, they are sour.) Does it need more lime? You be the judge. If it needs more of something, add it.

Add a GLOB of Frozen cilantro (Or the leaves from a bunch of fresh cilantro)(Or, if, like my friend Gina, you don’t LIKE cilantro, you can leave it out!). Pulse. Taste. IT IS DONE!!!

This recipe will provide you with a large bowl of better-than-most-restaurants quality salsa. We usually use about half of it right away, and I freeze the other half for later use.

Authentic Table Salsa

The Cilantro Quandary

Giant Pile of Cilantro!

Probably somewhere (Mexico?) the salsa ingredients Tomato, Onion, Hot Peppers, and Cilantro ALL GROW AT THE SAME TIME. You know, so you can MAKE SALSA by using the ingredients in your own garden. In our wacky modern age, Texans get the ingredients for salsa at the HEB and give nary a thought to it, because most people are completely oblivious to what grows where when.

But in actuality, in Central Texas, hot peppers and tomatoes ripen in the “warm season” (May-November) and onions and cilantro can only be grown in the “cool season” (November-March) Because of this, it is not possible to make fresh salsa from your own garden, except for like ONE DAY in April.

Now, onions can be dried and stored, so they aren’t as problematic in a temporal sense; but cilantro cannot be dried, it must be fresh or it loses its flavor. How Can One Possibly Solve this Quandary?

What you do is, you pick all the leaves off the stems. It is not hard and doesn't take all that long either. This is a restaurant skill that you learn like the FIRST WEEK you work in a kitchen, it is really quite simple.

The solution I have come to is this: I pick the cilantro at the peak of it’s perfection (it goes to seed quickly) and de-stem and FREEZE it. This is the G*R*E*A*T*E*S*T solution ever, because then you have “fresh” homegrown organic Cilantro for all your Mexican, Indian and Thai dishes. (The frozen cilantro leaves must be used in cooked or “cooked-ish” preparations like salsa, soups and curry; it won’t work in Thai Beef Salad or any dish where it absolutely HAS TO be raw.)

Here I have put the leaves into ONE freezer bag, and the STEMS into another, for the making of vegetable stock

I always put in into a gallon sized zippy bag, in a thinnish layer. That way when you need some, you can just break off a piece, like breaking off a piece of Peanut Brittle.

It stays a nice, bright green for a long time, too.

Pickling Jalapenos

Can you see how big and crisp and fresh these are?

Last month I went to a VERY FANCY dinner, out under the sky at a place called Johnson’s Backyard Garden. It was an event called Outstanding In the Field, where I enjoyed a fabulous meal in wonderful company for free, that I meant to blog about. Sometimes people say to me “Do you ever RUN OUT of things to Blog About?” and It is SO not what is happening! I actually have such an ENORMOUS backlog of things to blog about, that I have HUNDREDS of photos of events and recipes and dishes that I never found the time to blog about in a TIMELY fashion, just sitting in my computer.

Once it is not TIMELY anymore, I feel embarrassed! I wish I got paid $50 a post or something, so that my innate GREED coupled with my DESIRE TO MAKE A LIVING would COMPEL me to write a post everyday, maybe even TWO a day. But if I ever want to get to that point, where I am getting PAID to share my fascinating thoughts, I have to write two posts a day for FREE for, I don’t know, a WHILE. RIght? So let’s get down to business:

"Outstanding In The Field" fancy outdoor dinner table

ANYWAY: While I was at this event, I got to talking to Mrs. Johnson, the wife of Farmer Johnson, and we discussed farming/gardening. And she said something along the lines of, right now we are sending our CSA customers a lot of jalapenos because everything else is either dead or still a seedling. I said in reply, “Oh, you have Jalapenos? Because my crop FAILED this year! I kept the plants alive through September, which is when they are really really prolific, but instead of getting a couple of grocery bags full of Jalapenos, I got ZIP!” And Mrs. Johnson, BLESS HER HEART, said, “Oh just come out here and pick some for free, you can have all you want.”

Because I am EXTREMELY FOND of the word “FREE” ( as I document here! ) I replied, ” Don’t say that unless you really mean it, because I WILL COME.”  And then, after getting over the Flu, I WENT!!

Johnson's Beautiful Crops and Soil

OH. MY. GOD. You should SEE the Johnsons’ farm. The soil, though only a few miles from my house, is entirely different (East Austin is where all the good topsoil is. I live in South Central Austin, and my topsoil alternates between gravel, clay and caliche, and is about 3 inches thick.) The Johnsons’ farm is in the Colorado river alluvial bed, and the topsoil is five feet deep and as dark and rich as chocolate cake. Their plants are all enormous and thriving, the jalapeno bushes were taller than me! THEIR FARM IS AMAZING!!!

Basket of fresh jalapenos being washed in the sink

I picked a basket full of red and green jalapenos in about half an hour. Next day, I pickled them. I usually make two different kinds of jalapeno pickles: Thai and Mexican. The Thai pickles are best as “fresh” pickles, that is to say, never cooked, just packed in Thai pickling solution raw and jammed into the fridge. But you can also pickle them to be shelf stable.

The Mexican Style pickled Jalapenos are pickled with bay leaf, garlic, carrots, and onion, and have a more savory flavor. The basket of peppers I picked made 12 pints of Mexican Jalapenos and 5 pints of Thai jalapenos. Here are the recipes:

Thai Jalapenos

Fill a large canning boiler with water and bring to a boil. Sterilize canning jars (I usually sterilize MORE than I will need, and I base my need on how much I have to put up. In this case, I sterilized 18 jars, and I thought I would need 14.)

Have new canning jar lids and bands that you bought at the store handy. Buy many, you will use them up eventually! I bought 24. In a large pitcher, mix together a quart of white vinegar and a quart of water. Add 4 cups of white sugar.

Then, sit at your table, and slice jalapenos into slices (include seeds) and pack them tightly into sterilized canning jars. When they are full, pour the vinegar, water, and sugar solution over them, leaving a half inch of headroom. (I didn’t do this on one jar and it EXPLODED in the canner. SO don’t forget to leave the headroom or your jars will explode.) Put on the lids and bands, submerge in the still hot water in the canner and boil for fifteen minutes. Remove from canner and let them cool. They are done!

Slicing

If you are only going to make yourself like ONE jar of pickled jalapanos, don’t bother to can them, just follow the instructions up to putting on the lid, and throw them into the icebox and use them right away.

Mexican Jalapenos

These are a little more involved, but so good! Do the jars as above. In addition to many jalapenos, you will need one or two bay leaves per jar, a bunch of carrots, an onion, and a head of garlic.

Peel the carrots and chop them into pieces roughly the size of a jalapeno.

Peel the onion the cut into chunks. Peel the garlic cloves.

Scout investigates the Mexican Style Jalapenos

Into each sterilized jar, put a bay leaf, a carrot, and a clove of garlic. Take the jalapenos, and pierce them with a paring knofe so that the brine will be able to enter their cavities. I usually kind of poke them once near the top and then cut the bottoms in half. pack as many jalapenos as you can into each jar, adding another piece of carrot and some onion chunks as well as peppers. Add another clove of garlic if you have extra. Pack full. Add a teaspoon of salt to each jar.

Mix a quart of white vinegar with a quart of water in a jug or pitcher. Pour over the peppers, and press them down to allow air to escape from the pepper cavities. Leave 1/2 inch of headroom on each jar. Put the lids on and seal them. Process for 15 minutes and then remove and allow to cool.

My Pal Gina who lives in San Francisco asked me: “What do you use pickles jalapenos FOR?” My Mind Broke. What food is NOT improved by the addition of jalapenos? So, I will be doing a series on WHAT TO DO WITH JALAPENOS!

Eighteen pints of pickled jalapenos! ENough to last until next summer and give away too.