Homemade Salsa
Published 7/31/2022
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Use up your garden veggies and make homemade salsa with juicy tomatoes, onion, fresh garlic, bell pepper, and cilantro.
Gorgeous Garden Salsa Recipe
Garden bursting with veggies? We’re here with a simple homemade salsa recipe that will take care of your overflowing produce!
We love homemade salsa because it’s truly the perfect vessel for crunchy tortilla tips, plus doubles as a topping for many things such as tacos, baked potatoes, fajitas, and more!
Our homemade salsa recipe is made with juicy garden tomatoes, 2 types of onion, garlic, bell pepper, and cilantro. Best part? No need to mince everything by hand when you can use a food processor!
Why you’ll love it!
Use up all your garden veggies!
Healthy
Fresh
Perfect snack
Featured Ingredients
Tomatoes: tomatoes are the basis of salsa and lucky for you, pretty much any kind of tomato works. We used a medium tomato on the vine, but you can also use roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, etc.
Bell Pepper: bell peppers are easy to grow, so we threw one in! Feel free to use any color.
Onion: we used two types of onion in this recipe – red onion and green onion.
Garlic: fresh garlic is absolutely necessary for homemade salsa!
Fresh cilantro: fresh herbs are key for homemade salsa!
Like it spicy?
Do you like spicy salsa? Here are some things you can add to up the heat!
- Jalapeño peppers
- Poblano peppers
- Chili peppers
- Red pepper flakes
How to Make Homemade Salsa
This recipe for homemade salsa is ready in less than 10 minutes!
- Process veggies: add tomato, green onion, red onion, garlic, cilantro, and bell pepper, and process until combined.
- Add spices: add salt, cumin, chili powder, cayenne, and lime juice. Add the remaining tomato.
- Process again: process the salsa again until it reaches your desired consistency. You can either process it smooth (like restaurant salsa) or leave it chunky, more like pico de gallo.
- Serve: serve your garden salsa with your favorite tortilla chips or as a topping on your favorite meal.
Latest Dips
FAQ
Homemade salsa is made from a base of tomato, onion, garlic, and salt. Other ingredients such as fresh cilantro, different veggies, and spices can be added as well.
When making fresh, homemade salsa. There is no need to cook it.
We recommend adding fresh herbs, garlic, and salt to salsa to make it taste better.
If your homemade salsa is made fresh and NOT canned, it will last around 5 days in the fridge.
Storage
Store salsa in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 5 days.
Looking to can your salsa?
If you are looking to can your homemade salsa, check out Wholefully’s canning salsa 101 post!
Fresh Homemade Salsa
Ingredients
- 4 medium tomatoes*, quartered
- ½ small red onion
- 3 green onions
- ¼ cup cilantro with stems
- Zest of 1 small lime
- 1 small bell pepper, we used orange
- 4 cloves garlic
- 1 teaspoons salt, or more to taste
- 1.5 teaspoons ground cumin
- ½ teaspoon chili powder
- ⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper
- 1 teaspoon fresh lime juice
- optional: small jalapeño, seeded
Instructions
- Place 3 of the tomatoes into a food processor* along with the red onion, green onion, cilantro, lime zest, bell pepper, and garlic. Pulse the ingredients together on low until all the ingredients are processed and combined, but not soupy.
- Add the remaining tomato, 1 teaspoon of salt, cumin, chili powder, cayenne pepper, and lime juice and pulse the salsa again until the ingredients are processed and incorporated.
- If you like chunks in your salsa, leave the salsa as is. If you like a smoother salsa, process until it reaches desired consistency. Taste test and adjust with salt.
- Transfer the salsa to a jar and cover or serve immediately with tortilla chips.
Tips & Notes
- We used vine on red medium tomatoes. You can use any type of tomato you would like for this recipe, just be sure to add a few at a time so you can monitor the water content of the tomatoes. If you add all the tomatoes at once and have watery tomatoes, you may end up with a very runny salsa.
- You can also use a high-speed blender for this recipe (like a Vitamix). However, we do not recommend just any blender. If you have a food processor, we do prefer that!
- If you like spice, you can add a jalapeño.
Watch It
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
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Photography: photos taken in this post are by Ashley McGlaughlin from The Edible Perspective.
My family loves fire roasted salsa so the only change I made was to roast the veggies then followed the recipe exactly. We are a spicy family so I did add the optional jalapeño. Everyone LOVED it. I will be making this on repeat!
After I put something in the place of the cilantro, I think I’d use parsley and chives, this would be excellent.