Fermented Salsa

with Green Tomatoes and Peppers

Fermented Salsa is so easy and delicious!

This is the perfect recipe for using up all those last garden odds and ends as the harvest season winds down and the first fall frost approaches. For us, that’s likely to be sometime this week, so we spent a few hours this weekend gathering up every last delicious bit of summer. Now I have a kitchen piled with green tomatoes, not-quite-red-yet bell peppers, a few last anaheim peppers, more jalapenos than I could ever possibly use, and our recent annual harvest of garlic. Sounds like salsa to me!

To add to my salsa-making merriment, my volunteer cilantro plants are thriving right now! I wish that were the case at the height of tomato season, when I make my big batches of red tomato salsa. Unfortunately, the height of tomato season seems always to come long after my summer cilantro has bolted and gone to seed. Not so with this end-of-harvest salsa!

If you are just making one batch of salsa, or if you have a large food processor, you may be able to pop all your ingredients in at once, give it a whirl, and salsa’s done! However, I have an itty bitty food processor (a handy, but small attachment to my Bosch mixer) and several batches to make, so here’s what I do:

I begin by chopping all my tomatoes. This will give me an idea of how many batches of salsa I can make. You will need approximately 4 cups of chopped, fresh tomatoes for each quart jar of finished salsa. (I say approximately and I mean it. Nothing in this recipe is hard and fast. If I’m short on peppers, oh well. If I didn’t have quite enough cilantro, no big deal.)

Next, I chop up the rest of my veggies into large pieces (just small enough that the food processor can handle them) and keep them nearby. Then, I grab a little of this and a little of that, filling up the food processor many times, until all of my ingredients have been finely chopped and added to a big punch bowl.

Now, I simply fill clean glass jars with salsa, making sure to leave at least 1/2″ space at the top of each jar. These can be canning jars, or not, because you won’t actually be canning this salsa. You are just going to ferment and then refrigerate, so as long as they are clean, have no cracks, and have a tight-fitting lid, they should work just fine. I find that leftover applesauce jars are my favorite size for salsa and also free. 🙂

Once your jars are filled and the lids are on (not overly tight) simply leave them out on the counter at room temperature for 3-7 days. After 3-4 days you should begin to see little bubbles rising to the top of the jar. You may even have liquid leaking out all over the counter. This is a good thing! It means your salsa is ALIVE and fermenting as it should be – also that you may have filled your jars a bit too full. If this is a problem, set your jars on a small plate or a cookie sheet to keep your counters clean while your salsa finishes fermenting. There is no rule for how long to let it go, but I find the salsa is very active and not overly sour somewhere between 4-5 days, but this can depend on several things, including the temperature of your kitchen.

Once you are certain that your salsa has had a chance to ferment you can store it in the fridge for several months at least. We are usually just finishing up last year’s salsa right around the next year’s harvest and we’ve never had any trouble with the salsa going bad. If you don’t notice mold or any kind of off odor, your salsa should be just fine.

We love having a recipe that allows us to use up all the delicious odds and ends from our garden harvest that might otherwise go to waste. And we especially love having such an easy and delicious way to provide our family with probiotics all through the long, winter months!

Many thanks to Lyndsey Edmonds who posted the base for this recipe many years ago! Her blog, Passionate Homemaking was an enormous blessing to our family as we were just starting out on our traditional foods journey! This recipe has stood the test of time!