Salsa, Day 1…

We purchased all the produce required for the salsa, it is quite a bit of stuff. It pretty much filled the whole box of the truck. This picture shows all the peppers and onions but only half the tomatoes. Our six seat dining table is right full.

Gramma and Poppop blanched half the tomatoes over at their house and we did the other half. Thank goodness as it took us 3 hours of steady cutting, blanching and peeling. (and thank goodness for air conditioning).

We started with 225lbs of tomatoes and we peeled off an amazing 40lbs of skin. The next thing we do is chop each tomato into 1-2 cubic inch pieces and soak them overnight in a bit of coarse salt. This pulls all the excess water out of the tomatoes and allows us to pour it off in the morning. If we didn’t do this the salsa would be very runny. We ended up with 6 single batches of tomatoes and 3 double batches. So this should be about 185lbs as it sits, but tomorrow we hope to pour off 20 or 30 more pounds of water. Sure seems like a lot of work to end up with less stuff.

I then took all the peppers, Onion and peppers (lots of peppers) and divided them into piles. We cook 3 different heats of salsa, Mild, Medium and really hot. The mild gets it’s light kick from a few Jalapeños, which on the Scoville scale, are very mild.

The medium gets the same amount of Jalapeños in the mild, but with the addition of a couple dozen of other hot peppers, which brings the heat up a tolerable notch (this is the one I like).

The Hot gets the same amount of peppers as the medium, but then we add another BIG pile of the hot peppers. Last year we tried habeneros but it made the salsa taste like pepper spray, so this year, it’s a BIG pile of very flavorful hot peppers… yum.  

We are looking forward to tomorrow to start the 2 day cooking and canning process…