Six Pepper Salsa

By: CTRmom
Jun 1, 2009

I don't know if this salsa recipe is typical of Brazilian salsas, but I do know this recipe is special. It was my neighbor Nina from Brazil who taught me to make salsa and to can it. It was my first venture into canning. Now we bottle whatever is abundant almost every year, but we never miss canning this salsa. There was a period of several years when we suffered without this amazing recipe. All I can figure is that the carefully copied ingredients must have been thrown out with the remains of the chopped vegetables one fall, because the next year the recipe card was gone. Oh the mental anguish of not knowing if we could ever duplicate our beloved salsa! Oh, the hunger! I began searching for a recipe with the unique combination of six different hot peppers that our recipe had. No luck. I even located our long-lost friend Nina and gave her a call. Sadly, she didn't recall the recipe or me. No matter. I will always be grateful for her friendship and her salsa. I began trying to recreate our salsa by altering other salsa recipes. Thanks to Wonderful Salsa as my starting point, I finally hit upon the right combination of peppers and spices. U-pick farm fresh or garden ripe tomatoes are the only way we've ever made this recipe. One batch usually lasts till the tomatoes are ripe again — about a year — plus a couple of pints to share. Preparation time is how long it takes us to chop all the veggies. We are probably too meticulous. We do the tomatoes and onion in 1/4-inch dice so they are easy to pick up with a chip and small enough that we don't bother to peel them. We chop the hot peppers even smaller. Cooking time is cooking plus processing time.