Tomato Salsa; Fermented

A new recipe, one that I got from Barb at Nourishing Gourmet (see link)

My friend Mona, and I tried this out Saturday and it was a lot fun. I tried two different fermentations; one with lacto-bacillus whey from Drake's Goat Milk Yogurt, and the other was my own Kombucha. The Kombucha quart was so active it bent the lid upward after only 2 days and I had to open it before before the jar exploded. I took out half of the salsa put back the other half into the fridge with a Kombucha mushroom to keep it aerobic. We ate the fresh, fermented salsa and really enjoyed it. It was fizzy, and had a punch to it..... very satisfying. there seemed to be a lot of lactic acid. I guess Kombucha microbes must love tomatoes. In this picture you can see the Kombucha "scooby" or mushroom that will allow some flexibility during cold storage fermenting and keep the microbes safe. I've used this Kombucha mushroom with my sauerkraut also. ( see my first blog)

You will need for 1 or 2 quarts;

8-10 ripe tomatoes preferably from your garden, various kinds

3 mild peppers, big to med size and to your taste for hotness

5-6 cloves of garlic

1 yellow onion med size

1 bunch of cilantro

1 TBS Real Salt per quart

Cumin powder.... 1/4 tsp per quart

3-4 TBS live whey per quart

The most important thing about salsa and (perhaps the hardest part) is getting the skins off the tomatoes and peppers. There are two ways to do it relatively easily. One is to roast the halved tomatoes and peppers close to the heat unit in an oven on broil (the picture below shows our vegetables before going under the broiler) another way is to grill the vegetables over open flame and yet another way is to drop tomatoes into boiling water for a minute or two. I believe this is called par-boiling. I haven't par-boiled peppers, just tomatoes. It is best to roast peppers in broiler or open flame or grill.

When the tomatoes split their skins remove and let cool enough to peel. When the peppers get brown and blistered rotate until at least 3 sides are blistered. Remove those and place in a zip-lock bag and let steam. When they cool, their skins will come off fairly easy.

The peeled tomatoes goes into a food processor and blended to desired texture and the peeled peppers, onion and peeled garlic I chop by hand to desired texture. If peppers are the hot kind, please wear rubber or latex gloves. These peppers were not that hot and we chopped by hand but maybe the capsicum oils were not fully developed yet. ( I am showing my ignorance of peppers.)

We combined the onion, garlic, peppers and cilantro together and it didn't taste very hot, so Mona went to her garden and got about 5 or 6 little round green chili peppers and chopped those and added them.

We alternated layers of tomato pulp and green pepper mix between 3 quart jars and then last added the 1 TBS salt and 3-4 TBS of lacto-bacillus whey. I put Kombucha in one of the jars and that is the one that almost exploded. The liquid should be within 1 inch of the top. We tightened the lids, labeled the date and whey and set to ferment for 3 days at room temperature. The liquids in the picture are whey on the left and Kombucha on the right.

The salsa I opened for fear of exploding, tasted just exactly hot enough for us. A couple days of fermenting brought about the hotness we wanted. The rest of it is still in cold storage.