Quick-Cooked Tomato-Chile Sauce: Salsa Cocida de Jitomate

One of the best things about this project has been the salsa. We have found some good jarred salsas that we like, but fresh salsa is far better than even our favorites. This is the first salsa I made, and I like how simple the recipes are so I can make all sorts of adaptations. I am still trying to match the salsa verde from the taco truck by our house - I know it has poblanos, so I have been making a bunch of different poblano-based salsas to try out different flavors. It's fun, and they have all been delicious (although sometimes a bit too hot).

Enough about that, on to this salsa, a red salsa. Here is the mise:

It's quite simple: just some canned tomatoes (or fresh tomatoes if you prefer and if they are in season), a few serrano chiles, and chopped onions and garlic. Because I was using diced canned tomatoes, I did not have to chop them up. All I had to do was chop the serranos:

Not much to it. Then I put everything in the blender:

I pureed everything until it was mostly thinned out, but there were still some chunks for texture:

Next, it was time to fry the salsa. I put some lard in our medium skillet, and heated it over medium-high heat:

When it was hot enough to make a drop of the salsa sizzle, I poured the entire carafe into the skillet:

Stirring constantly, I cooked the salsa until it thickened and changed to a more rusty color:

That's it! It was quick and very easy, and it made a ton of salsa (more than two cups) that we used on a bunch of different dishes. It's flavor is so much better than jarred salsa, and it is easy to make variations on the salsa (some of which are in the book) because it is so simple. We rarely eat jarred salsa anymore unless I am lazy, which is very nice.

Sources:
Tomatoes from Muir Glen
Everything else from Central Market