Roasted Red Salsa

Salsa roja (roasted red salsa)

I can’t remember which site I found this recipe on, but it’s delicious.  The roasting of all of the veggies really ads a nice flavor to the salsa.

Note that this makes a lot — a big mixing bowl full.

•  16 full size tomatoes, or nearly a produce bag full of roma tomatoes (we used roma)
• 2-3 yellow onions
• 20-25 Serrano peppers (remove caps) Note: this many peppers makes it hot. Feel free to reduce # of peppers, or scrape the seeds out of them
• 8-10 cloves of garlic
• 1-2 Tbsp salt
• 1-2 bunches cilantro

1.  Halve the tomatoes and onions and lay cut-side up on a cookie sheet along with the peppers and garlic
2. Roast at 375 till the onions look nice and translucent (see bottom left of the next picture), tomatoes look soft, and peppers are getting a nice char on them
3. Let it all cool a bit, then run through the food processor with salt and cilantro (we had to do this in two batches)
4. Stir it all together and eat!

Storage

It’ll last at least a week in the fridge in a Tupperware-type container, although it’ll rarely stay around that long. You could potentially freeze some if you wanted to store it for longer (then defrost it in the fridge), but really, it is at its best when it’s still hot from roasting!

Spiciness

Varies a lot based on personal taste and individual peppers. Sometimes you’ll get a batch of extra hot peppers and other times you might as well have used bell peppers.  If you are very sensitive to spice, cut the seeds out and just use the meat of the pepper. Also, roasting the peppers longer will bring out the sugars in the peppers which will make it less fiery. Use fewer peppers if you’re wary.

Roasting

You can definitely do this on a grill instead of the oven, in fact, that is my preferred method. I typically roast the onions until they’re translucent, the garlic until it’s browned (not too black), and the tomatoes and peppers until the skins are mostly blackened.