Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Canning Salsa Verde!

Since this is my second garden-related post of the week, you can tell what is on my mind and consuming my time these days! This year my heirloom tomato plants are not doing well. I think they got blight. :( So I likely won't be canning any marinara unless I buy some tomatoes in bulk. Womp womp. But fortunately, my tomatillos are doing great! I guess I must have beginners luck with gardening because my first year of growing heirloom tomatoes went great and now my first year of growing tomatillos has gone great.

Last week I picked all of these tomatillos plus a few more on Saturday.


I had about 4 pounds of them so needed to come up with something to make so they could be put to use! Since chips and salsa is practically a food group for me (seriously, is there a better snack?), I decided to make roasted tomatillo salsa. After googling around, I decided to make this recipe. Spoiler alert: this recipe calls for WAY too many serrano chiles - more on that later in this post.

I started off by roasting the tomatillos, garlic and serrano chiles under the broiler.

The start of awesome salsa verde

It took quite awhile to do this. But I was able to blend batches of roasted veggies while roasting the other veggies, so multi-tasking made feel like it went fairly fast.

Roasted goodness
When I got to the half way point, I tasted what I had blended so far, which was about 2 pounds of tomatillos, 4 serrano chiles, and 1/2 of the cilantro, onion and garlic. Thank God I tasted it before blending the rest of the  serranos because it was HOT HOT HOT. I thought the ratio of 1.5 pounds of tomatillos to 5 serrano chiles seemed a bit off - and I should have trusted that judgment! So I left out the other 6 serranos, added the rest of the tomatillos, onion, garlic, and cilantro and it tasted perfect. It still has a kick but an appropriate amount of kick.

So if you ever decide to make this recipe, unless you want a 5-alarm-burn-your-mouth salsa, halve the amount of serranos the recipe calls for!  I also added the juice of one lime to balance things out. I will also note that when I looked at other recipes, they called for about 1/2 of the amount of chiles that this recipe called for, so it's not just me thinking it was overkill to include 5 serranos.

~11 cups of salsa, ready to be canned!

Next it was time to can! I made 2 1.5 pint jars and 5 1/2 pint jars. A 1/2 pint (1 cup) of this is like a serving size for me (ha!) but I figure we can gift the smaller jars to friends this summer and fall.


I feel such a sense of pride when I can things I've grown. I feel like I am channeling the spirit of my maternal grandma Val. She did LOTS of canning. She passed that knowledge onto her daughter, my mom. And now I'm canning. It's pretty cool to keep a vintage skill like this alive!

There are lots more tomatillos that will be ready to be picked later this month so I am planning to make this recipe again!

7 comments:

Charbelle said...

My mom knows how to can and I feel like I should learn since it's becoming a lost art. I agree completely, chips and salsa is it's own food group! I like spicy food but I can see where that ratio was completely off balance! So glad you taste tested before moving on, that is so important! Love that it all turned out so great! Your friends and family will appreciate the home grown goodness!!!

Marlys said...

That darn blight! I learned the hard way that you never plant tomatoes on the same spot in your garden in consecutive years, so I always rotated their location. I hope that will help in future years, but it just hurts to see that happen! I don't know if that is what happened in your case, but that was my problem.
Your salsa looks awesome!

Jolene - EverydayFoodie said...

It is so satisfying to grow food, and especially make things from that food. I really wish we had a large garden, like my mom did when I was a kid. I would love to grow a lot more of our food than we do. Your salsa looks great!

Gracie said...

Ooooh, roasted! I've always made mine raw. But roasted sounds delicious.

San said...

Love, love, love. Chips and salsa is the best... and with homemade salsa? Even better!!

Amber said...

oh man salsa verde is the best!!! That is so awesome your tomatillo crop is so good and you can make so much of it. I hope I get enough tomatoes to do some canning. I have only canned once, when I made plum jam with some plums from my friends tree. It was fun, but I only got 6 cans out of it and it felt like A LOT of work for only 6 cans lol. but the jam did turn out super yummy and if I get enough of a crop from my garden this year I'd like to do some more canning. My sister in law, grandma, aunt and cousin do a TON of canning each year.

Jeanie said...

You are rocking this canning thing -- and it looks delish! I love salsa verde but never made it. Good on you, Ms. Lisa -- your gran would be proud!