When you have fresh ripe tomatoes flowing from your garden day after day, what’s better than making a fresh tomato salsa?!
I love the fresh ingredients of good salsa. I don’t mean one made from a mix, with canned tomatoes, or even with jarred peppers and onions. To me, “fresh” means starting with raw ingredients, all real food that you have grown yourself, if possible. It can be as simple as slicing red tomatoes from the garden into a bowl and adding lots of chopped onion, a little bit of minced garlic, salt to taste, and a plate of chips.
It’s not only better tasting but far more nutritious this way. Fresh vegetables contain loads more vitamins than their canned or frozen counterparts because they are harvested before they have time to lose nutrients. Raw foods contain enzymes that aid in their digestion.
I could go on and on about the virtues of fresh food, but since I was really talking about salsa, let’s get back to that. Salsa also provides an easy way for me to take advantage of my garden since most of the ingredients I need to make this salsa are in it.
A few tips:
- If you ever find your tomato salsa is too spicy, just add a little more lime juice to mellow it out.
- Rinse your chopped onions before you use them and pat them dry. That will also mellow the bite that fresh onions have and leave you just with the delicious flavor.
And yes, this is family-friendly and mild. This salsa recipe can bring us all together in the kitchen in just a few seconds!
My fresh salsa recipe is easy to make and has a delicious sweet and spicy flavor. It goes great with chips, tacos, burritos, fajitas, or any Mexican-style meal. You can also use it as a topping for enchiladas or add it to your eggs in the morning instead of ketchup. Two words for this recipe—fresh and delicious!
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Tomato Salsa
This fresh tomato salsa recipe always wins, from dipping chips, to topping tacos to marinating chicken and everything in between.
- Prep Time: 15 minutes
- Chilling Time: 1 hour
- Total Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
- Yield: Serves 12 1x
- Category: Sides & Sauces
Ingredients
- 2 cups Roma (or Plum) tomatoes, chopped
- 1/4 cup chopped red onion
- 1/4 cup chopped yellow onion
- 1/4 fresh jalapeño pepper, seeded and finely minced
- 2 tablespoons fresh-squeezed lime juice
- 2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
- 2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1/4 teaspoon sea salt
Instructions
- Combine tomatoes, red onion, yellow onion, jalapeño pepper, lime juice, cilantro, garlic, cumin, and salt in a food processor.
- Pulse the processor until mixture is only slightly combined, yet remains chunky.
- Transfer entire mixture to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate at least 1 hour.
Notes
- Allow 1 hour to refrigerate before serving.
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Have you tried this Tomato Salsa recipe? It’s so easy and so fresh with a bowl of chips—please tell us how it turned out for you.
Alice – thanks for the suggestion. I like the idea of freezing extras to use at a later date.
I prefer to rinse 2 chopped onions, and pulverize that with lime segments (no seeds, pith or peel) and some cilantro pulled off stems in the food processor. I put one tablespoon of that into salsa, then add one teaspoon at a time, to taste, with a pinch of pink Himalayan salt. Freeze remaining purée in ice cube tray for later usage. Nobody I cook for likes chunks of onion in fresh salsa, and especially not in guacamole. No waste, and kids who “hate onion” love it.