Canning Salsa

We have a little garden in our backyard. It’s just big enough for some tomatoes, Anaheim peppers, jalapenos, and zucchini. Remove the zucchini from this list and you have a pretty good start on the ingredients for our favorite salsa canning recipe.

It’s the end of August, so we are enjoying the annual harvest from our little garden. That means it’s time to make some salsa.

We’ve tried canning a few different salsa recipes, but our recipe comes from our neighbor and friend, Melissa.

We did about 19 jars last summer, but we ran out of salsa a few months ago. So, this year we’ve completed 24 quart jars. We shared our recipe and process so we can remember just how much work it is next year!

Ingredients:

• 80 tomatoes
• 5 onions
• 6 Anaheim peppers
• 5-6 Bell peppers
• 6 jalapenos
• 3 garlic cloves, chopped
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 1/2 cup Apple cider vinegar
• 1/3 cup salt
• 4 tsp Cumin

Directions:

First, clean and peel the tomatoes. Boil a pot of water that can hold a large strainer. Put the tomatoes in the boiling water for 60 seconds. Drain the hot water using the strainer and empty into a bowl of cold water. This makes the tomatoes easy to peel and keeps them from cooking too early in the process.

Peel off the skin, and then squeeze out the juice and seeds into the sink. Keep the “meat” of the tomato and put in into a large pot. Squeezing the juice out of the tomatoes will give you a nice thick salsa, but it’s a very messy process. We enlist all the help we can get.

Dice the remaining vegetables into small pieces and add to the pot with the tomatoes. Leaving some of the seeds from the jalapenos will make the salsa a little spicy. Wear gloves when dicing the peppers and especially the jalapenos. Add the remaining ingredient to the pot with the tomatoes.

Bring the entire mixture to a boil carefully. Don’t put the heat on too high, and make sure you stir often so the bottom doesn’t scald — it ruins the taste and is also very tough to clean.

Let simmer for two hours until the salsa is the thickness you like.

Put the salsa in warm jars and close with a lid. Bring a canning pot water to a boil. Boil the filled canning jars for 25 minutes. Turn off the heat and let sit for 5 minutes. Remove carefully. Then place on counter for 24 hours.

This recipe should yield about 6-8 quart jars of salsa. It mostly depends on the size of tomatoes you use. Our Roma tomatoes from our garden tend to be on the small side, so we double those. We also often supplement and buy seconds from local farmers.

We usually do a double batch. It is a lot of work and takes probably 4-5 hours from start to finish. As you can see, it’s a lot of work. But, just about everyone in the family can contribute, so it is something we can enjoy together. The best part about it is that we can all enjoy the delicious salsa for the next year.