It's Confession Time

As much as we try to eat real food, whole food, as-often-as-possible food we've raised or grown ourselves... I confess that we hadn't found a salsa we liked as well as store-bought. I cringe to even have to say that. But there we were, putting Chi-Chi's salsa on our homemade tortilla. With home-cooked refried beans. With green chili and pork from our own pigs. It was criminal, really.

 

So when we had a day of harvest that looked like this

 

 

I decided it was time to try yet another canned salsa recipe. Maybe this time we'd find one that we could tolerate. I stumbled across a website that had a recipe that actually sounded good, along with lots of detailed information on getting the ratios right. There were weights for all the ingredients according to batch size and tips on adjusting heat. What most caught my eye? The fact that there wasn't a drop of vinegar to be found in this salsa. They used lemon juice as their acid. Why, that's so much like the lime juice I would use in my pico de gallo that I felt quite certain this could make the difference in flavor that would finally appeal to my family. Because if there was anything we'd agreed on over the failed attempts at canned salsa, it was the vinegar taste that just wasn't supposed to be there.

 

So we skinned and chopped tomatoes



 

We weighed and diced and minced peppers.

 

 

We won't even discuss the onions and the goggles required for this undertaking.

 

And we produced jars and jars of salsa. We loved it right out of the pot... but what would it be like in a few weeks or months?

 

Let me just say that we've got a jar of store-bought salsa on the shelves and even though we made a rule that we should finish up the store-bought before getting into our home-canned, that rule has been clearly broken. And nobody wants to be the enforcer. We have finally found a salsa that we can proudly put atop, beside and into our other homemade goods.

 

You can find the recipe and all the directions here. It's actually a great lesson/tutorial/walk-through for even the most novice canner while still providing great information for those experienced in many types of preserving.