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