tomatillo salsa

Last year my friend Diane gave us a jar of tomatillo salsa and it was phenomenal. We used it all up pretty quickly and were sad to go back to store bought stuff.

After my initial canning experience, I decided that I totally could (and should) whip up a batch of tomatillo salsa to can. In my hunt for a recipe, I stumbled upon a great blog called Farmhouse Finishing School, and I decided to use their recipe. Since I read in my Hip Girl's Guide that it can be dangerous to make substitutions until you understand the process and recipes really well, I resisted the urge to alter it too much.

Two small tweaks:
1) I ran out of tomatillos and instead of going to the store, I read online that green tomatoes could be substituted. Jose donated about 10 from the garden and I was back in business.
2) I saw a similar recipe in one of my canning magazines that included cilantro. Since herbs don't do too much to the PH (and the recipes were really very similar), I added several tablespoons.

The result is fabulous salsa. Super delicious. Very fresh. Jose and I decided to buy a pressure canner as an early anniversary gift to ourselves and it was money well spent. Although we didn't use the pressure functionality this time, the pot is large enough that I was able to give 10 half pints a water bath all at once. This may not sounds super impressive, but after doing 4 at a time with the jam, I'm pretty jazzed about it.

I will note that I doubled the FFS recipe and the result was about 90 ounces of salsa. I had made her pesto earlier in the weekend and it was a 6-7 ounce recipe, so when she said that the salsa recipe made "a ridiculously small amount" I was thinking 1-2 jars. Wrong. So much salsa. Well, so much to me, the non-hardcore canner.




Next on my list? Something with blueberries...