I finally made SALSA yesterday!!! The other day when we were up the canyon
looking at the leaves I just kept thinking it’s not officially fall unless we
can something. My mother-in-law is a big
time canner and last year I took the plunge and did my first batch of canned
Salsa. Canning salsa isn’t hard it just
takes a LONG time. Literally, you have
to do it on a day where you have at least 8-10 hours just to spend on it.
So here is the recipe, then I will take you step by step
with pictures.
Canned Salsa Excellente!
Combine in extra large pot:
6 quarts
(1gallon and ½ or 24 cups) Tomatoes peeled and cut
4-5 Onions
finely chopped
3-4 Bell
Peppers coarsely chopped
3 Large
Anaheim Peppers
2 Yellow
Waxed Peppers
4 Jalapeño
Peppers
1 Habanero
Pepper
1 Tbsp. Sugar
4 Tbsp. Red Wine Vinegar
3 Tbsp. Garlic Salt
4 Cloves Garlic pressed
Finely chop all peppers.
To make salsa non-chunky put all contents through the blender or food
processor. With the Bell Peppers, you
can do any kind of color combination: green, red, yellow. To make your salsa “MILD” do not add any seeds.
To make it hot and spicy, add the seeds.
When all contents are chopped, cook on medium high heat
until boiling. Reduce heat and cook for 2 hours. Stir often.
Fill sterilized canning jars then boil the filled jars for 25 minutes each.
The first step for us is going out into the garden and
seeing how many tomatoes we have.
I put them in my apron when I pick them, it makes me feel a little more country! :)
Our tomatoes have been really slow this year, most of them
are still green. My mom is great, she
donated a ton of tomatoes to this project, thanks mom!
You have to prepare the tomatoes. You DO NOT want the tomato skins so you have
to peel the tomatoes. Last year was my
first time and when I heard this I was picturing myself peeling tomatoes with a
vegetable peeler over the garbage can.
Luckily before I did it I asked my mother-in-law and she told me you
boil them. You boil the tomatoes for 3 to
4 minutes and their skins loosen up and you peel them right off.
You can see mine in the pan and their skins starting to crack. They don't all crack, sometimes you have to poke into them with a knife, but after that they peel right off. Easy!
I just peeled mine over a bowl and dropped the skins right in there. Then I put the tomato right into the blender. Most of my tomatoes where pretty big, so I would put 3 tomatoes at a time in the blender.
My hubby and I like chunky salsa so I would just pulse the tomatoes up a little bit. Then I would pour it out into a measuring cup and I would keep tally marks of how many cups I had so I wouldn't get confused. I would pour the cups into my large pot and I had it on low heat.
I did pretty well. I needed 24 cups and between my tomatoes and my mom's tomatoes I was able to get 21 cups, not bad! To make up the rest I just used canned tomatoes.
Can you see around my thumbnail, it is an orange tint because I had been dealing with tomatoes for like 2 hours! Good times! Now the tomatoes are set, lets talk peppers. Here is a photo review so you know what the peppers look like. Last year I had no idea what half of these peppers looked like and I felt stupid when I went to the store and had no idea what I was looking for.
First the easy ones, the bell peppers.
You can use any color you want, I like the yellow ones especially because they add a lot of color.
This cute little one is the Yellow Waxed Pepper.
This guy is the
Habanero
Pepper!
It is the hottest pepper and if eaten by itself it will make grown men cry...well unless you are just a crazy and eat the hottest of hot stuff and are used to it I guess.
It grows well in our area so we grow it in our garden.
These are the
Jalapeño
Peppers.
They also grow well in are area so we just use the ones from our garden. You can use them when they are red or when they are green.
This is the Anaheim Pepper I bought from the store.
This is the Anaheim Pepper my husband showed me out in the garden. I didn't realize we had some of these out in the garden, I told him it looked really different than the one from the store.
Since we had so many peppers in the garden, I didn't follow the recipe exactly when it came to the peppers. I just added whatever I felt like. However, I did learn a very important lesson from last year.
Last year my skin was on fire after cutting up all of those peppers.
This year I wore gloves and didn't have a problem at all.
I think every year when I can salsa and cut up the peppers I will wear gloves!
After I added all the peppers I added the vinegar, sugar and garlic. At this point my salsa was about ready to overflow so my hubby helped me split the salsa between 2 pots.
I added the onions. Holy cow, they were so strong my eyes were going crazy. I ended up wearing my swimming goggles, they helped a ton! My husband was making fun of me because I looked dumb, but after 5 minutes of being in the living room his eyes started to water too so he left. Onions are powerful little things, they can make people disappear!
Once all of my ingredients were ready, I boiled the salsa for 2 hours like the recipe says. During the last hour I was getting the jars ready. I washed the jars in really hot water and I boiled the lids and rings.
When it was time we poured the salsa into the jars, put the lids on and put them right into the steel waterbath canner.
I didn't understand all of this last year, but I bought an awesome canning book called the Blue Book Guide to Preserving and on page 6 it does a great job explaining this. It says:
Food naturally high in acid and acidified foods having a pH of 4.6 or less may be processed in a boiling-water canner. The boiling-water method is essential for safely canning fruits, soft-spreads, tomatoes, pickles and other acidified foods. Filled jars sealed with two-piece caps are submerged in water to cover 1 to 2 inches. Water in the canner must maintain a boil,
212°F, during the entire processing time as specified by a recipe tested for canning. Heat is transferred through the food by convection. High-acid and acidified foods must achieve an internal temperature of 212°F when processed at or below 1, 000 feet above sea level.
Basically, if you do not do this your food is not safe. This is a very important part to make sure the molds and yeast are inactivated by the boiling-water process. The actual recipe I got said to do this process for 20 minutes, but all the other tomato recipes I read the minimum I saw was 25 minutes. I am kind of a paranoid person when it comes to stuff like this, so I did all of mine for at least a 1/2 hour.
This is a day after shot, there isn't any water in my water-bath canner, but I just wanted to show you what it looks like and show you the awesome canning tongs. You have to have them, imagine scalding hot boiling water all around the jars. The only way to get them in and out is with the tongs.
Hooray, canned salsa!
I got 18 jars out of this recipe. But take into consideration my jars are not all the same size.
When I serve my salsa I add chopped cilantro and
a drained can of white shoepeg corn and a drained can of black beans.
Sometimes I even put in splashes of lime, but it just depends on if I have any or not.
Holy yummy goodness, I want to bust open a jar and have a little salsa fiesta!
If you have a gazillion tomatoes, try it! It isn't hard like I said, it just takes time.
Good luck!