My salsa is excellent! I’m very happy with how it turned out and plan on making more this week.
I made a half batch yesterday and put it in the fridge to try just now. Though I otherwise followed the recipe closely, I did make one major substitution: Ro-tel with habaneros, pictured above in the thread. Wow, I didn’t expect that much heat. There’s a good cumin kick and the garlic is pretty sharp. Even knowing it’s in there, I can’t detect the dill.
At the grocery store yesterday I picked up a yellow onion (they didn’t have any Walla Wallas) and some green onions, a can of low salt crushed tomatoes, cilantro, a lime, and a head of garlic. This afternoon I’ll try my recipe but substitute the powdered onion and garlic for fresh, and add some lime juice and chopped cilantro. I’ll try to blend it as little as possible to make it “chunkier.”
I’ve never cooked with dill so am not really sure what its supposed to taste like, or if it has a notable flavor like marjoram or basil. All I know is adding it to my original salsa gave me the closest approximation to what I remember the old RS tasting like.
Hehehe, while dill is a bit odd, salsa’s just “sauce”. Make it like you like it. If you like your salsa, it’s good salsa. 
Man, I want to find that book (I can just about read Spanish, so finding that version would probably be good for me), and I want to try all of the salsas, especially the peanut one. Just to be sure, you’re meaning the one by Déborah Holtz and Juan Carlos Mena? I hope so, that book sounds great even if I’m not looking at the one you mean. Tacos will certainly be my savior or my destruction, so I kind of hope I’m right.
Hehehe, I’m happy (and a little flattered you remembered) that you had a chance to follow my advice. But to be honest, even the hottest habaneros have a fruity flavor that makes them distinctive in a salsa, no matter how hot it is. That said, if I’m eating an al pastor taco, yeah, that extra fruitiness is totally welcome.
As to the hotness: even regular Ro-Tel isn’t really messing around, you can taste it through a block of Velveeta, which is a big block of fat for that capsicum to get through. The habanero stuff is pushing hard, and it is absolutely my go-to for the quick+nasty approximation to queso dip that Ro-Tel dip provides now. I’m putting both on the shopping list, and my darlin’ and I will discuss my fatty, tortilla chip delivered plans.
Canned tomatoes? If it’s a cooked salsa, do it! It’s not going to make much difference, and you don’t have to cook down the tomatoes. It seems like a no-brainer. If you’re trying to do a fresh, uncooked salsa, (like say Taco Cabana’s basic red sauce, which is basically a finely pureed pico de gallo) I can’t see it working out exactly the same.
If you’ve been in one of the Mexican food deprived locations that doesn’t have a reliable tomatillo sauce source, I’ll get my wife to supply her recipe. It’s basically 8 peeled tomatillos, 3-4 serranos and about 3-4 cloves of garlic and an onion roasted in the oven then pureed, and dressed with fresh cilantro. I suspect if you just followed that recipe by roasting everything very hot until one of the tomatillos made popping noise, you’d get a pretty good salsa, but I’ll get an accurate version with temps/times/accurate measurements and report back.
Mmmm, green sauce. If I could figure out a perfect copy of the dearly departed Jimenez’s Green Sauce, I’d be in a corner of heaven. Hot in a smack your face way, but gentle. It likes you.
And even though salsa doesn’t have to be hot to be salsa, the weird, thin salsa at Ojeda’s in Dallas is one of the most intriguing thin, amazingly hot salsas I’ve ever had. It’s tomato based, and it brings the heat and flavor, but not too much vinegar. It’s as thin as Taco Bell salsa, but amazing. I suspect it’s blend of peppers is it’s secret, and I envy the folks with access to different peppers fresh from their garden. We haven’t grown anything in a few years, but the peppers we got from the later seasons of cross pollination between our jalapenos and bell peppers were so good.
Made one of my go-to salsa this weekend. I cut up three ripe mangoes, added a couple cans of black beans (after rinsing), added two jalapenos, diced, and half a big purple onion chopped/diced, and a bunch of minced cilantro. It is very good, even better the next day.
Is this just a thread for mexican-style salsas? Because I’m obsessed with salsa verde at the moment - lovely fresh flavours which go wonderfully with grilled fish.
Yes, Holtz-Mena are the authors. Mine looks like this:
Mine is the 2nd edition, which looks like this:
I did not pay $1000 for it (maybe that’s in pesos, although I’m on the US site.)
Rick Bayless in his recipes, uses canned tomatoes all the time for freshly blended salsas, and I trust his judgment on them. I can’t imagine why a good canned tomato would not work well in a fresh application, especially if you are comparing them to hothouse tomatoes you get at the supermarket most of the time. Sure, in a rougher hand-cut pico de gallo type of application, it may not work so well but in blends? Obviously, a good fresh tomato would be ideal, but I’ll take canned any day over the crap they sell at the supermarkets around here.
While I generally agree with Rick Bayless, if he is of the position that an uncooked salsa made with canned tomatoes was indistinguishable from the same recipe made with fresh tomatoes, I’d disagree strongly with him.
Edited to make clear: The salsa could be tasty when made with either, mind you.
I have a question about canning salsa.
I have never done any canning or made preserves before. I saw the little kits with tongs so I went to the Ball/Kerr website, saw what they were for (water bath canning) and read the Canning 101 instructions.
Those instructions say
So here’s my question: do I have to jar the salsa while it is hot?
My process right now is that after I cook everything, I put it in a blender to get it all chopped to a smaller, more uniform size (I can’t dice everything in tiny sizes by hand and the tomato chunk are way too big to just cling to a tortilla chip, eh). Then I refrigerate it for 24 hours to let the pectin set up.
Can I jar it at that point? Can I let it heat up to room temperature and then heat up the jars, fill them & seal them and then do the water bath?
Many moons ago, going down a rabbithole of salsa recipies I came across one that suggests blackening the vegetables first in a cast iron pan under the broiler.
Have been doing it that way ever since, and get compliments and requests for more quite frequently.
And the blackened fond adds a dimension of amazing flavour to the taco meat when simmered in said pan!
Try it on the grill over charcoal.
Any reason why you wouldn’t want to go straight to canning instead of letting it sit in the fridge?
I am disappointed in myself that I have never, my fellow junglist! (About 75% of the food I eat is bbq’ed.)
I must pay my penance by doing so soon, and with a few good chunks of tiger maple mixed in.
For discussions sake, here’s my recipe.
10-13 vine tomatoes depending on size
1 large spanish onion
2 bell peppers
2 heads of roasted garlic
1 bundle of cilantro
Handful of oregano (preferably Mexican - but I am not picky)
A “dose” of hot peppers. (I use whatever’s on hand. Red chilis, jalapeno, serrano, whatever’s clever.) 4-6 dried red chilis usually gets the most compliments, I’ve noticed.
Juice of 2 limes
A good ka-jigger of salt
A small ka-jigger of granulated sugar (recommended by an old co-worker - does wonders.)
Roast/blacken veggies in the cast iron pan, garlic on it’s own in tinfoil with olive oil.
Process untill desired consistency.
Works for me!
(ETA - meant to quote Jnglmssiv)
As I said, the time in the fridge helps the pectin to gel and set AFAIK. I’m not sure if that would be the case if it was sealed before it was refrigerated; that’s why I’m asking about it.
The pectin will set up regardless of being in the fridge. You want to can it while it’s still piping hot to ensure that it’s still sterile.
Copy that; thank you needscoffee! I’m about to start prepping veggies now!
If salsa has enough cilantro in it to my taste, I will drink it like soup!