Satan's Salsa!

(Ingredient recipe follows at the end)

What else to do but smoke 'em and make salsa! Here they are after an hour over oak...


After a couple three hours at 225F, I chopped them up, put them in a quart mason jar with a tooth or two of garlic, a quarter cup of brown sugar and filled it with apple cider vinegar to steep-


Got a pack of chipotles and in they went into another jar to steep as well-


Put them in the back of the fridge to steep 6 or 7 weeks. Stopped by the store on the way home and here's most of the goods. Lots more of the needed spices are in the cupboard, but we'll cover that later. That entire bowl of garden picked chili peppers went into the recipe as well!


The plan is to make Satan's Salsa and cold pack it in pints, with a pressure canning at the end. I've eaten fresh Satan's off the vine with grilled steaks and they are perfect puffballs. Nothing to get on fire about- I've plucked them off the vine to munch on with fajitas or steaks and they are fine. Now, Mrs Rivet can't handle that heat, but it's A-OK with me....so you can split the middle.  Okay here we go...let the madness begin!


The kitchen smelled "chili-hot as hell" Mrs Rivet said! Once I chopped up the cilantro and spring onions it mellowed out a bit. 3 bunches each, with the bottom half (stem-ends) of the cilantro discarded-


Added the juice of 6 limes, really nice smell in hell's-kitchen right about now...


Then, the good stuff! Pulled out the 2 quarts of peppers steeping for 7 weeks. The key to making a great sauce is that the steeped peppers need to be liquified to form the "matrix" of the salsa, the part that carries all the fresh goodness from the cilantro, onions and chiles you add. Here are the smoked peppers ready to be blended, everything from the jar, apple cider vinegar too-


And here go the steeped chipotles too-


I understand the cilantro thing...folks either love it or hate it. My dad couldn't stand the smell of it much less the taste. Look at me...go figure.

The good thing about my plan to pressure can this salsa is that the pressure canning will cook out a lot of the heat from the chiles and really mellow everything out, including the cilantro. It will end being almost an afterthough of a taste, I think.

Uncooked, this salsa is Hell-Hot and Devilly! After pureeing the steeped chiles, I mixed the slurry with the chopped fresh ingredients and all the canned goods, plus all the spices-


I can't stress enough safe-canning procedures. Citric acid is added to the batch to ensure the proper acid level to prevent food-borne pathogens. It may have been overkill, but there were plenty other ingredients in here that made me think I'd need it. Food safety is nothing to take casually. Please follow your food-canning rules to the letter, and keep everything clean! Home canning can be a wonderful and enjoyable experience when done correctly.


The raw salsa was fiery hot, devilshly good, but whew! My plan is to mellow it out by the pressure canning process, cooking it as well as adding another level of canning-safety over the water bath. Here we are ready to go into the pressure vessel-


And canning at 10LBS pressure for 35 minutes....


Then the first load is done, and cooling off for 24 hrs undisturbed. Ended up with 24 pints total....


The next day, here's the cooked salsa nekkid- right out of a hot jar. Real rich color, nicely cooked down chiles, and a real mellow smell....


Here we go with an Aztec chip dipped in it. Outstanding! Everything melded together nicely, nothing overpowering, not even the heat. Satan's Salsa is definitely for chiliheads~ I didn't break out in sweat, and I didn't need anything to quench the fire. Just a rich, layered tingle in the mouth that said "this is a really good sauce"!


This salsa is a great compliment to quesadillas, nachos, or even as a dippin' sauce for chicken wings.

 

Satan’s Salsa

 

2 28oz cans tomato puree

2 28oz cans crushed tomatoes

2 28oz cans diced tomatoes

1 butt load of fresh garden peppers finely chopped

1 QT smoked and steeped hot peppers

1 QT steeped chipotle peppers

Juice of 6 limes

¼ Cup Chili Powder

¼ Cup Cayenne Pepper

1/3 Cup Ground Coriander

¼ Cup Chopped Fresh Garlic

¼ Cup Kosher Salt

2 TBSP Allspice

3 TBSP Chipotle powder

4 TSP Canning Citric Acid (if you are going to can the salsa. If eating fresh, omit)

Plus you got me drooling LOL