Making Salsa

It's rather late, for a farmhand anyway, and I am still up because I got a little enthusiastic with my ugly tomatoes.

I brought home a bunch of damaged tomatoes home from the farm the other day and as we speak they are being preserved as salsa. Despite using a ready made spice and dehydrated vegetable mix, I still underestimated the amount of time it would take. I wasn't going to make a large batch, but then it turns out I had three batches (1L each) worth of spice mix and I thought, what the heck, these will all fit in the water bath at once so it won't be much more work to make it all. This is true and I'm glad to get full use of my water bath space - so efficient! I did however, not imagine how long it would take to dice 13.5c of tomatoes!

For anyone interested, the spice mix I use is Bernadin Fiesta Salsa Mix. It has no nasty ingredients, just: dehydrated green bell pepper, salt, dehydrated onion, dehydrated garlic, spices, sunflower oil and jalapeno pepper powder. Saves you the time to to chop all of these as well as tomatoes.

The one thing I never do and always wonder afterwards is, how much better would my salsa be if I removed the tomato seeds? Has anyone had experience with salsa? Do you think this matters?