Cilantro Salsa
- October 2010
- Recipes
I make salsa almost every week. I love good salsa, and it is outrageously expensive to buy, and so cheap to make. A climber wrote to me asking for a salsa recipe to enter in the Gendarme Rocks Cinco de Mayo festival in Seneca, West Virginia. He got second place with this recipe, but he lost to a local using a very famous and beloved secret local ingredient called a “ramp” (an onion-like vegetable), so it’s still pretty proud!
Get a few cloves of garlic, green onions, 1 serrano pepper, 1 pasilla pepper (or an anaheim chile), lots of cilantro and your choice (depending on what you have) of either 1 large can of Muir Glen Organic fire roasted tomatoes, or fresh tomatoes, or even better, both.
If you are using fresh tomatoes, cut them in half and then squeeze all the insides out of them. It seems like a waste, but otherwise your salsa will be watery and unflavorful.
In the blender, put in about a third of your tomato matter, and then slightly chop up the garlic and some onions and one of the peppers, and pull off lots of leaves from the cilantro. Blend that all, but be careful you don’t end up pulverizing it, and then pour it out. Then add more tomato, the other chopped pepper, and more cilantro, and do one more round with the last of the tomato and cilantro. When it comes to cilantro, you can never have too much, in my opinion.
Once you’ve finished blending all the batches, stir it all together with a wooden spoon in your salsa bowl. Now the secret final ingredient is salt, to taste.
If there’s something you like more or less among those flavors, you can change it up, but the pasilla pepper makes it dark and rich!
Every once in a while I add apple cider vinegar and lime juice to my salsa, but not usually.
