I love salsa. My favorite is the fresh stuff, pico de gallo, basically just chopped-up tomatoes, onions, garlic, and jalapenos with a little salt, lime, and cilantro. My sister once pointed out how easy it was to make, and it was like a light-bulb going off. Of course I can make my own salsa!

I’ve made pico by hand. It’s a lot of work cutting up all those veggies, but good practice at knife skills, I suppose.

I’ve made it in a blender too, but blenders are really made for mixing liquids. They don’t move mostly-solid mixtures around enough to bring new material into contact with the blades. They just end up puree’ing whatever is at the bottom of the blender, and then, hey, you’ve probably got enough liquid to blend, but you’ve also got a puree. Not good salsa.

I’ve made it in a food processor. That’s pretty good, but the art of getting just the right chunkiness without having big chunks left over and without crossing the line to soupy is a little tricky. And the work bowl of a food processor typically only makes a pint or two of salsa. Not nearly enough for my tastes.

Then my step-mom mentioned to me that she had the food grinder attachment for her Kitchenaid mixer. It had come as a set with the mixer, and she never used it, so she offered it to me. Of course, I had to make salsa!

The grinder produced a little less-chunky salsa than I normally would prefer, but it was still recognizably “salsa” and not “tomato and onion juice-drink”. One thing that I really liked was how consistent the product was.

The ground up tomatoes in the photo above are sitting in a colander, which is placed in a bowl. This is to allow some of the extra liquid to drain out, and reduce the wateriness of the salsa. I still have yet to find a way to produce salsa without it being watery, short of cooking it to simmer off the liquid, but that produces cooked salsa, which is wonderful, but not my favorite. It tends to end up tasting more like spaghetti sauce than salsa.

Everything went into the grinder: tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, cilantro, and garlic.

Issa prepped the veggies by cutting them down to sizes small enough to go into the grinder. This was some work, but not near as much as cutting it all up by hand. We had 15 lbs of tomatoes!

When we were done, there was about two gallons of salsa.

We put about five pints of it in the freezer…

We put about a quart in the fridge for later, and we dug into the rest.

I woke up the next morning with garlic taste still in my mouth. I am vampire-safe.

In case you’re interested, here is the recipe we used. Honestly, you can hardly go wrong.

• Some tomatoes
• Maybe half that much onion, or more if you like onion
• A whole bunch of cilantro, except if you hate cilantro, in which case you can leave it out. Did you know that there’s a bitter flavor compound in cilantro that some people can’t taste? That’s why some people hate cilantro so much and others love it. The ones who hate it have the gene that allows them to fully taste it. The rest of us literally can’t taste that bitterness you hate so much.
• Juice of one lime, or more if you’re making a really big batch
• As much garlic as you can stand to peel, but probably not more than a head. Or three cloves if you don’t want to vampire-proof everybody who eats it.
• About two jalapenos, seeds included. More if you like hot food. Or mix in other types of peppers if the jalapeno’s burn is not exactly what you want.
• Salt to taste. Don’t over-do it!