The Great Salsa Experiment

November #6 (yes, I was supposed to post this yesterday, on the 6th, but computer time was hard to come by).  I am thankful for what DH and I came to refer to as The Great Salsa Experiment this summer.

You see, our onions, tomatoes, and peppers grew very well this year.  So well that keeping up with them became rather a challenge.  Usually if we get enough of all three (well, four if you divide the peppers into hot peppers and bell peppers, both of which go in salsa) ripe at one time and can get a batch of salsa canned, we are grateful.  This year, we had salsa ingredients coming out our ears, taking over the kitchen, piling up in the garage. . .

So we set out on a quest to come up with the perfect salsa.  The recipe we'd used for years, which had originally been given to DH by a co-worker in the late 1990's, just wasn't the exact taste and consistency we wanted.  We'd tried tweaking it a bit, through the years that we were fortunate enough to have ingredients for making salsa with, but hadn't yet hit on our perfect version of salsa.

Enter about 100 pounds of vegetables just begging to be made into salsa.  We ate fresh salsa, aka pico de gallo, nearly every day for a month.  And we had a revelation.  The canned salsa we wanted wasn't much different from the pico de gallo I was making.  But could it be canned using the water bath method?  Or would it have to be pressure canned?  And if it was pressure canned, would those lovely pieces of tomato, peppers, and onion become just an unappetizing mush?

Thus ensued a searching of the internet for canned salsa recipes. Specifically water bath canned salsa recipes. And comparing those recipes, down to the tiniest ingredient, with my pico recipe.

Finally, we came up with a recipe that sounded like it would taste good, be high enough in acid to be safe for canning without pressure, and should also not be too watery once it was done with all it's processing (the biggest complaint of our 1990's recipe).

Batch number one was made.  It came out tasty, but the consistency still wasn't what we were hoping for.

Some more adjustments were made, mostly in size of veggie chunks and the addition of cooking down half of the tomatoes into a sauce-like consistency first.  Thus batch number two was canned.

Still not perfect.  Then DH had a light-bulb moment.  He got out the blender.  He pulsed some of my freshly made pico in it.

Aha!  That was it!  That was the texture he had in mind.

And so batch number three got whizzed through the blender before being put into jars and processed in the canner.

Now we have our taste, our safe level of acid, and our texture.  We have our perfect salsa to make forever more!

I'm thankful that we had the garden bounty to conduct The Great Salsa Experiment this year.