Texas Red Salsa - Make it Better # 1

You would think its hot enough down here already, but this salsa will kick up the heat.  This is for a restaurant style red salsa that will be a bit hotter than y'all are likely to find down the street.  The heat can be adjusted up or down with different peppers and how you treat them; here we are showing the tex-mex style found in most of our local restaurants.  Again, a bit hotter than normal but only using serranos and jalapenos.  If y'all like spicy food or food that is good for you, this is perfect.  The ingredient list is at the end.

Wash your veg.

Start roasting the peppers, onion, and 2 cloves of garlic first.  These take the longest.  Yes there are 3 cloves in here, but only because we really, really like garlic.

Core the Roma tomatoes and start roasting them too.

Be careful not to over roast the peppers, just blacken them and get them in some boiling water.  You want them soft and they need the most boiling time.  Add your garlic and onion to the boiling water too.

Finish roasting the tomatoes.

They go in too.

But, they will be done first.  Pull them out when the skins have burst and set aside to cool.

Peel the skins.  We want to add the roasted flavor and break down the texture of the skins.

In your molcajete, pour about 2 tsp of salt, pinch some cilantro, put your half clove of raw garlic and the 2-3 cloves of cooked garlic and grind it to a paste.

Pull your onion and peppers from the boil when they get soft and trim the stems.  Careful not to touch your eyes.

Start adding one of each pepper and some onion to the molcajete and grind that to a paste.

Keep adding one of each pepper and some onion, grinding.  It will take a few minutes.

Spoon the paste, tomato skins and some extra cilantro into your food processor.  I didn't show it, but you also want to add the juice of two limes and two of the tomatoes at this point too.  If you don't, the tomato round will be too full for the average food processor.

This round, blend till you like the texture of the skins and pour it in a mixing bowl.

Next round, add the rest of the tomatoes and blend to the texture you like.  You can make the salsa chunky by blending it for just a couple seconds.

Add this to the bowl and mix them up.

Pour some back in the molcajete to serve.  This is great with chips as well as on top of any tex-mex dish.  After cooling down in the fridge, it gets even better.  Hope y'all enjoy!

Ingredients:  8-9 Roma tomatoes, 2.5 cloves of garlic (cook a 3rd one if you love garlic, 1/2 a clove stays raw), cilantro, salt, 3 jalapenos, 3 serranos (both are common and easily found at most grocery stores), 1/2 of a medium size white onion (yellow onion is too sweet), and 2 limes.

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