Making Salsa - mamabear style

Our family has been making this salsa since 2010. Full disclosure: Canning is a science. Do your research on the water bath method and do NOT alter the recipe to fit your taste buds. If you mess with the quantities of ingredients you mess with the shelf life and risk food borne illnesses. Now that I’ve got that out of the way let’s move on to the best part of making salsa MamaBear style: I freeze my tomatoes whole until I have enough for 2-3 batches of salsa. Follow these steps to save an hour or more of cooking time and to avoid runny salsa.

1) Wash and core tomatoes as they ripen.

2) Freeze in a single layer in your freezer

3) Once frozen transfer to a freezer bag.

4) When you have enough for a batch of salsa put the tomatoes in a bowl to thaw.

5) Hold the tomato over a different bowl and careful peel off the skin. This allows some liquid to be used in the cooking process, but most is left behind in the thawing bowl. On average with our favorite salsa tomato - Jaune Flamme - we pour off 6 cups of water instead of having to COOK it off.

6) Compost the skins or save them to blend into a batch of spaghetti sauce

I have no clue what that odd reflection is in the photos of the thawed tomatoes. It looks like MOLD, but I promise it isn’t! Jaune Flamme tomatoes make a beautiful orange salsa that is a best seller at my farmer’s market booth. The plants are very prolific so don’t be scared away by the need for 70 tomatoes to make a batch of salsa. I get hundreds of tomatoes from a handful of plants.

Roma tomatoes have a low water content so I skip the thawing process and simply run the frozen Roma under hot tap water to remove the skins and add the tomato to the stock pot.

MAMABEAR'S {NOT SO} MILD SALSA

30 medium sized tomatoes or 70 Juane Flamme tomatoes for Fiery Flamme Salsa
2 green bell peppers
1 red bell pepper
1 yellow bell pepper
4 medium sized onions
1 cup vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup salt
1 cup chopped cilantro
3 cloves minced garlic
6 habanero peppers (Remove the insides for slightly milder salsa or leave the seeds for full strength. Chop them finely)

Add the habaneros last because you MUST USE GLOVES when handling them.

Prepping multiple batches and don’t have time to thaw overnight? Prepare tomatoes by removing skins (soak in boiling water for 30 seconds and then transfer to ice water so the skins start to slip off)

Cook all tomatoes on medium high heat while you chop the remaining ingredients. Mash the tomatoes as they cook to break them up into smaller pieces. Then start adding the salt, sugar, and vinegar. After 20-40 minutes of cooking down the tomatoes (depending on water content), start to add the rest of the veggies.

Cook an additional 30-60 minutes depending on how thick you want the salsa to be. The longer you cook it, the thicker it will be. I love that while I'm doing all this prep, my dishwasher is sanitizing and heating up my jars. I also by this point have put my canners on the stove and have an extra pot of water heating to sterilize the rims of my jars.

I cut up a 1/2 gallon milk container to use as a funnel and use a ladle to grab one scoop of veggies from the bottom of the pot, one scoop of juice from the top, and one scoop from the side of the pot. By then the jar is filled one inch from the top. I pull four jars out of the dishwasher at at time so they stay hot and then continue to fill the rest of them until I have ten filled.

Wipe down the lip of the jar, place the lid on and hand tighten. I use pint sized jars because that's about how much salsa we'd eat in a week once a jar has been opened. I put the jars in a water bath for 15 minutes and then set them on my counter to cool for a day. If you want to use 1/2 pint jars plan on a 15 minute processing time as well.

Just how many tomato and pepper plants do you need to be able to make salsa? Good question! We make as many as five batches of salsa out of the 12 roma/celebrity plants and 6 jaune flamme plants. I have 12 bell pepper plants and 2 habanero plants. I usually use last year’s harvest of habaneros from whole frozen peppers and a combination of fresh and frozen bell peppers.

It’s hard to get enough of everything ripe at once and the freezer takes the stress of that away. We also sell some fresh tomatoes and peppers and use them in our meals throughout the growing season. I also freeze tomatoes to use in our chili recipe. Six celebrity or roma tomatoes replace any tomatoes a six quart crockpot chili recipe calls for. Run the frozen tomatos under hot water to remove the skins and set them on top of your other chili ingredients.

Part way through the cooking process stir in the tomatoes so they break down and the flavors meld. It is so simple and I didn’t have to slave over a hot stove to blanch or can a single tomato.

On the side of our refrigerator is a sheet that has a tally of how many batches of chili tomatoes we have left in the deep freeze. This is a great way to use up the tomatoes that are left over when you don’t quite have enough for a batch of salsa.

So there you have it! Salsa MamaBear style - efficient and delicious!

I’d love to hear if you try a batch of your own!

Happy Canning!