Canning Salsa

With the arrival of 25 pounds of tomatoes, and then the very unexpected arrival of 10 pounds of green beans and potatoes, I've been overwhelmed with fresh produce this week!  Don't get me wrong, it's a very good thing!  Some of it, we've eaten.  The rest of it, we're putting up to enjoy this winter.

Canning is a wonderful process by which you can store your own home grown goodness to enjoy over the winter.  There are both pros and cons to canning.  No matter what, you do need to be very, very careful when canning anything.  Botulism thrives in the anaerobic environment that exists in home canned items.  The USDA has published guidelines, that are updated every year on how to safely can food.  Patrice Lewis, at Rural Revolution, has also produced some excellent guides to home canning.  If you're interested in finding out more, I highly recommend reading what she has written about safely canning items.  I rely heavily upon the Ball Blue Book of Canning for my recipes. 

I do not pressure can.  But I do water bath can.  Jams, jellies, pickles, and salsa are among my favorite things to can!

The recipe for the version of salsa that I made this past weekend came from the Ball Canning Website, and can be found here: http://www.freshpreserving.com/recipes/zesty-salsa.

Chilling in the cool water.

One of the best parts of the tomato preparation process is blanching them in order to slip their skins off.  You drop the tomatoes into a pot of boiling water for a minute or two, and then pull them out and put them into a bowl of cold water.  The shock causes the skins to slip right off of the tomatoes, and chopping them is a breeze.  Unless if you have some stubborn tomatoes, in which case you have to score the skin with a knife in order to get the skins to peel back.  I save the skins and use them to make tomato soup. (Because that's the kind of weirdo I am.  My Mom grew up during the depression, and she taught this girl how to use EVERYTHING to it's full potential. 

Just one of the green peppers.

While I was waiting for the water to boil, I began chopping the green peppers. Choppy, choppy.  this is the first rough cut.  After I took the picture, I used Knifey to go back over the peppers once more- once crosswise, from bottom to top, and once up and down from side to side.

I added the peppers to the pot, and then the tomatoes started coming out of their bath, and I roughly chopped them up and added them into the pot.  The tomatoes fall apart relatively easily in the cooking part of the salsa.

I must admit that I cheat here a bit.  I have a mini-food processor. It doesn't do a lot, but it does come in very handy for some things.  This is one of those things.  Into the mini food processor, I added the jalapenos, cut in half, with seeds removed, the vinegar, the peeled garlic, and the cilantro.  Spinny, spinny, whirly, twirly, and everything was nicely chopped with a minimum of frustration on my part!
(I don't add hot sauce, and this is the point when your kitchen will become very fragrant!)

Onions were chopped and added, and we began cooking down the salsa.  According to the recipe, they salsa is supposed to come to a boil and then simmer for about 10 minutes.  I don't like to bring salsa to a boil too fast.  Bad experiences there, resulting in a pot of salsa - salsa and pot - having to be thrown out.  So, I cook over med-high heat so that the salsa doesn't burn.

While the salsa was cooking, I got the deep water bath heating for the jars, removed the jars from the dishwasher, and sterilized the lids.

Once the salsa had bubbled away for 10 minutes, I added it to the jars, wiped the rims, added the lids & bands, and began processing the whole shebang in the water bath canner.

The entire process - beginning to the last, gorgeous jar of salsa took me no more than 3 hours.  Of course, I've had a lot of practice slicing and dicing - One of my college jobs was slicing and dicing vegetables for a restaurant.  From reading the comments, it looks as if some people spent 4 hours along with chopping.  Take some short cuts here, people!  If you have a full size food processor, I believe you can use it to chop up your peppers and onions FOR you!  Even better, get a friend or two to help you so that you can whip through the canning faster, and then all of you can split the spoils at the end of the day!