Fresh Garden Tomato Salsa - Vitamix style!
My standard salsa recipe I love to use is absolutely wonderful, great for small batches, cut up in fresh chunks, and even works with canned tomato chunks when good fresh tomatoes aren't available. It's pictured on my Healthy Taco Salad blog, and includes simply four items - Tomato, green chilies, onion, and cilantro. BUT - having said all that, what do you do when you are handed a large quantity of fresh garden tomatoes? That's a lot of chopping right? I remembered seeing a recipe for salsa in the Vitamix cookbook of ideas, so with this large amount of tomatoes, this was the experiment to try this week. I used my own idea for ingredients and it came out great, obviously not a chunky pico de gallo, but the flavor pulled through! So I'm here to say that the Vitamix has been tested and proved to be a much viable option for salsa when you have a large quantity of tomatoes! I'm going to test freezing some and see how good the flavor stands up, my guess is it could be a good addition to some guacamole or as a topping on grilled meat, might lose the quality you would want fresh on your chip, but we will see.
For this batch of salsa I had 5 very large yellow tomatoes, to me they have less of a "tomatoey" flavor and are a little sweeter than red tomatoes. Cut the tomatoes up in quarters or so, and then place half the tomato chunks into the Vitamix. Add 2 cloves garlic, 1 1/2 cups cilantro (or two handfuls depending on how you measure 😀), 2 Tablespoons fresh lime juice, and half an onion also cut in chunks. Use the pulse button a few times to get things going, then mix at low speed for 10 seconds, thats really about all it takes to blend everything together. Now add remaining tomatoes and pulse a few more times, this makes the salsa a little chunkier, but if you prefer a smoother salsa, just throw them all in at once! The flavor of this salsa is perfect for my taste, but if you like a little more spice, add a jalapeño or hot sauce.
This process was easy and fast, so when you are handed that big bag of tomatoes and wonder what to do - don't be afraid to try it! And now for the freezer taste test - I froze a small portion of the salsa for several days, unthawed it, and did a side by side tasting of the fresh salsa versus the frozen salsa. Definately the fresh salsa wins, but would I rule out freezing? Not necessarily, there's always the guacomole, taco soup, scrambled eggs, etc, that the frozen salsa would add great flavor to. I researched a little about freezing and canning salsa, the popular opinion is canning to preserve the best flavor. So enjoy this fresh and share with your friends and neighbors if you have extra!
While perusing the Vitamix book, I came across several more interesting ideas, you will see more recipe ideas from that in the future!
Ole!