I recently made two salsas from scratch from tomatoes, hot peppers, and onions from our garden. I didn’t use recipes, but I can share the ingredients – in the first batch of medium salsa went roma tomatoes, hot cherry peppers, Mexican chilies, jalapeños, onions, roasted garlic, mango, papaya, lime juice and peel, honey, coriander, cumin, and chipotle powder; in the second batch I call “Inferno Salsa” went habañero peppers, Thai dragon chilies and everything else listed in the first batch minus the peppers. They both turned out yummy, the Inferno one is very hot because I used all the habaneros from the garden…
For the salsas I first roasted all the peppers, let them cool and then peeled all the skins off and chopped them up as twice-cooked peppers are very flavourful peppers – you can do the same with sweet bell peppers by just putting them on a baking tray in the oven set at 375 F and spritzing them with a bit of water at the start and end to make the skin peel better. They are done when the skin starts to shrivel, crack and peel, and the peppers start to lose their shape. Right out of the oven then put the peppers into a sealed tupperware container or in a bowl with plastic wrap over it. Leave in the fridge and peel the skins off the peppers once they’ve cooled down. Yummy! Just be careful doing this with hot peppers because your hands will be on fire for hours! Use gloves!
To can the salsa I used the oven canning method as I don’t have a pressure canner or a jar lifter to do the water-bath method. I had no idea you could can using an oven until my neighbour who has little Eastern European parents told me about it. The USDA doesn’t approve of this method, but people have been using it for decades without getting sick – if you do try it or other methods be really careful with your recipes – use ones specifically for canning, especially if you don’t have a pressure canner (edited so as not to kill anyone).
Oooooh! I’ve never heard of this method of canning before. I’ll have to give it a try… Thanks for sharing!
Wow, Sarah!
These look sooooo delicious!
I’ve never heard of that method either… will be interesting to try it out one day though! Mmmm… jams and such
Hope your hands are fine now, lol!
that is so gloriously mouthwatering… oh. my. And never heard of the oven canning method and I so going to use that!
Now that I’m working and have a little money for food, I so want to make some of this for presents…
Please do not give people bad canning advice like this. Botulism doesn’t give off a smell. Nor does it have a taste. Not only is canning in the oven not safe in terms of botulism and mold, but it is unsafe in terms of the jars, which can explode because of the heat change. They’re not made of pyrex. That’s why when you do a hot pack, you have to heat the jars up first. Salsa can be canned in a boiling water bath, and you should use a recipe that’s been developed for canning–you want the acidity to be right.
As for people not dying from oven canning, people used to drink milk preserved with formaldehyde. They sprayed apple trees with arsenic. DDT was sprayed from trucks that drove through town.
A jar lifter costs about two dollars. They have them at most large grocery stores, or you can order a canning kit online from somewhere like Lehman’s.
Sorry Harry, probably should’ve put a warning that this was an experiment while I’m waiting for my friend to drop off their pressure canner – the finished jars shown are small ones that will be eaten up right away. The acid content of my salsa was incredibly high so I wasn’t worried about the recipe for this method, but I do agree most recipes should not be canned in the oven (especially not sweets and pickled veg). There are ways around the glass and heat issues, but not around botulism. Canning is a delicate balance of acid and sugar.
Best advice for prospective canners – pick up a good book. My fave is Preserving the Harvest by Carol Costenbader
Yeah, I like the Ball Book. It is updated but has some neat old recipes, like for yellow tomato jelly, a Victorian favorite that I made last year (and froze). I’ve also used their herb/wine jelly recipe for making mugwort jelly. What I have done with small runs containing vinegar is that I don’t can them but just refrigerate them. Like recently I pickled some orange slices (excellent recipe in The Joy of Pickling) and just jarred them and put them in the fridge. One jar went off before I could eat all of them, but since they weren’t hermetically sealed and contained vinegar, no biggie. I have thought about pressure canning, but after reading about the bisphenol-A in jar lids, I decided I would learn more about dehydrating.:)
Thanks for this discussion.
Another truly wonderful site, wonderful color.
Thanks so much for seeing the need and filling it
‘Love of salsa, straight out of the jar.