Mark's Salsa Recipe
by Mark Albrecht

I don't remember the ratios, but I use tomatoes, onions, cilantro, garlic, 
serrano chiles and/or chipotle chiles, lemon or lime juice, and salt. Sometimes 
I'll add some Mexican oregano. 

I start by chopping my tomatoes (in a food processor), then I strain them to 
get as much juice as possible off of them. I put the tomato juice in a large 
pot and boil it down until it's nice and thick. I chop the remaining 
ingredients one at a time so I can get them to the consistency I want and then 
mix them all together in the large pot where I've been boiling down the tomato 
juice. At this point I'll taste it to see if the flavor is right. I bring the 
salsa to a boil and boil it a few minutes before putting it in jars. After it's 
in the jars, I'll boil them for another 25 minutes to process. 

A lot of salsa recipes call for vinegar, supposedly to get the Ph right for 
canning. We checked the Ph of this recipe a couple years ago, and it's plenty 
acidic without the vinegar. If you want to get Ph strips to be certain, the Ph 
should be 4.6 or less. Boiling down the tomato juice makes for a much better 
consistency with the finished salsa, as it can be pretty watery otherwise, even 
if you use romas or similar tomatoes.

If we can find some good tomatoes, I imagine we'll be canning some salsa in 
September.

mark