Easy Roasted Garlic Salsa
I love garlic in all its forms: raw, pickled, confit, powdered?, and especially roasted. I also love significant amounts of garlic in pretty much everything I eat. Every time I eat something and am thinking, omg this is crazy delicious! I realize about .2 seconds later that that’s because it’s loaded with garlic.
No surprise: I like my salsa garlicky, too. Well, my standard Tex Mex-style salsa, anyway. As I discovered on my trip to Mexico last summer, the US is seriously behind on its salsa game. There were so many varieties! So many tasty, tasty varieties, and nothing like the sad, bland, weirdly sweet jars of salsa you get from the grocery store.
But the recipe I’m sharing today is for my go-to tomato-based salsa. It’s based on my dad’s salsa recipe, but I changed a few things to make it less of a process, and more of a quick-and-easy-I-need-chips-and-salsa-immediately kind of situation. Which happens…not infrequently.
And I know I crapped all over jarred salsas not two paragraphs ago, but…I actually use canned tomato in this recipe. I use fresh tomato for basically everything because they’re so cheap here in Morocco, but for this, I get the canned tomato. Why? Well, fresh tomato simply isn’t better here. The tomato in this recipe is a vehicle–a carrier, if you will–for the other flavors. It doesn’t need to have much flavor of its own. Plus, canned tomato makes your end result pretty consistent every time, and it makes it a little easier on you to just dump a can in rather than chop up tomatoes.
If you are the kind of person who has extra roasted garlic laying around, then this recipe will be especially easy for you. If not, no worries: it’s not hard to do a quick “roasting” of a few garlic cloves on the stove. I detail my method in the recipe below!
Notes on the ingredients:
Roasted garlic and oil: Using the oil from the roasted garlic is essential, as it adds even more roasted garlic taste!
Cilantro: You absolutely must use fresh cilantro. Don’t even try this with the dried stuff!
Canned tomato: Yes, really.
Jalapenos: Use pickled! I wouldn’t use fresh; it’s doesn’t really go with this recipe.
Cayenne: With just jalapenos, the end result of this salsa isn’t very hot. If you want a hotter salsa, add cayenne or another mildly-flavored powdered hot pepper. My dad actually uses powdered ghost pepper in his recipe, but I don’t have any!
Salt: How much salt you use will depend on how much salt is in your other ingredients plus your personal taste. Try it after blending and see if you need more, add, and give it a few more seconds of blending.
Recipe:
Easy Roasted Garlic Salsa
Ingredients
Instructions
- Add all ingredients except cayenne and salt to a blender and blend until mostly smooth.
- Taste and add salt and cayenne as desired.
- Heat 2 tablespoons of neutral oil (I use olive oil) in a small saucepan over low heat.
- Add 5-6 cloves garlic and cook until soft and golden, about 10 minutes. Flip the cloves over halfway through cooking.
Store leftovers in an airtight container in the fridge and use within a few days.
It’s actually even better the next day (or just after a few hours) once the flavors have had time to meld!
