How to Make Roasted Salsa for Canning

I love making fresh salsa for canning with tomatoes from my garden each year but when you have a ton of tomatoes it can be quite a labor-intensive job. For this reason I like to make roasted salsa for canning when I have a large amount of tomatoes to use. With roasted salsa there is no need to blanche the tomatoes, peel the skins off, take the seeds out, or cut vegetables up into teeny-tiny pieces.

When making a roasted salsa you will need an electric broaster, a food processor, a pressure cooker, canning jars, a wide mouth funnel, and a jar lifter. As far as ingredients go you will need about seven to eight pounds of tomatoes (I used a mixture of Roma and Celebrity), seven large green peppers, three large onions, six tablespoons of olive oil, 1 cup of lime juice, four tablespoons of minced garlic, and hot peppers to give it the desired heat. For my salsa I used a handful of red Chile peppers, about three to four Cayenne peppers, and about two to three Kung Pao peppers. If you do not want a hot salsa you can cut back on the hot peppers or you can completely omit them.

Since the vegetables will be run through the food processor after they are cooked you will just need to rough cut them. After cleaning the tomatoes, you will want to cut them up; the Romas will be cut in half, while the Celebrities will be quartered. There is no need to peel them or remove the seeds, you will just need to cut off the stem, and core them. With the green peppers, simply cut the tops off, remove the seeds, and slice into large, thick strips. The onions simply get peeled, and cut into eighths. With the hot peppers, they are simply washed, and the tops removed, as they can be cooked whole.

Once all the vegetables have been cut, place them in the cooking dish of the broaster oven, and drizzle the six tablespoons of olive oil over the top. Then add in the one-cup of lime juice, and four tablespoons of minced garlic. Turn the broaster oven to three hundred degrees, and allow the mixture to roast for about three hours.

After the vegetables have cooked you will want to run them through the food processor. They will not all fit into the food processor at one time, so you will have to process them in several small batches. When spooning the vegetables into the bowl of the food processor, try to avoid getting the juice from the cooked vegetables, as this will produce a runny salsa.

Once the salsa has been run through the food processor you are ready to put them into jars. When putting the salsa into jars it is important to pre-heat the jars since you will be putting hot salsa into them, you can pre-heat the jars in a pot of boiling water on the stove or by running them through your dishwasher on the sanitize cycle.

To process the jars you will want to process them in your pressure cooker for twenty-five minutes at eleven pounds of pressure. This recipe produces around eight quarts of salsa.