Easy Homemade Salsa Recipe
In Mexico, this salsa is known as salsa roja (red sauce) or salsa de mesa (table sauce). “Salsa” literally means sauce. You will find it in every Mexican restaurant served before dinner with warm fried tortilla chips. It’s incredibly addicting!
I love to pack my salsa with as much flavor as possible to every ingredient has a thought behind it. And of course, fresh ingredients will bring the best and brightest flavor! It’s a great restaurant-style salsa recipe that’s always been a crowd pleaser.
And if you really want to impress your friends and family, serve it with homemade tortilla chips (I made sure sure include instructions) and try using it to make my Instant Pot salsa chicken for some amazing chicken.
Table of Contents
Key Ingredient Notes
- Fire Roasted Canned Tomatoes – If you need to use plain canned tomatoes, that will also work, but your salsa won’t be quite as flavorful. The fire roasted tomatoes really bring something special!
- Jalapeños – Use fresh jalapeños and you can adjust the spice level just by choose older or younger jalapenos. Young jalapenos are less spicy and they have smooth, deep green skin. Older jalapenos get spicier as they age and they will have brown veins running along the skin. The more veins, the spicier the jalapeno. You can also discard jalapeno seeds if you want less spice of leave them in for more spice.
- Make it More Spicy – Jalapeños are a pretty mild chili pepper, so you can use spicier peppers, like habanero or serrano. You can also add a little more chili powder or add a pinch of cayenne pepper.
- Cilantro – you can’t really substitute cilantro. It’s a very specific flavor. If you are not a fan, you can try to omit it and maybe add a little more cumin.
How To Make Amazing Easy Salsa Recipe
There is truly nothings complicated here, what’s more important is ingredients and amount of them:
- simple combine all of the ingredients in the food processor.
- when combining, decide if you want to keep spicy pepper seeds or not because that’s where spice is.
- close the food processor and blend well, until no more chunks remain. If needed, you can start and spot a few times, this helps mix and move the ingredients around for better blending.
- you’re done!
How to Make Tortilla Chips
- This is totally optional, but you’ll love the full restaurant experience at home!
- To fry the chips: Use small taco corn tortillas and cut them into quarters. Preheat about 2 cups of oil in a skillet until it reaches 350°F. Set a wire rack inside a baking sheet and cover it with a paper towels to catch excess oil.
- Add a few chips at a time to the oil and fry tortillas for a couple of minutes, until golden and crispy, flipping them half way through. Make sure to use metal tongs or metal spatula.
- To bake them: Spread cut tortillas on a large metal baking sheet. Preheat the oven to 350°F and bake them for 5-6 minutes. Flip each tortilla chip and bake another 6-8 minutes.
Using Fresh Tomatoes Instead Of Canned in Salsa
- I prefer using canned tomatoes over fresh because it gives the salsa flavor that is closest to one served at restaurants. It’s a deeper, richer tomato flavor and it will last a lot longer in the refrigerator.
- While fresh is great for Pico de Gallo, if you want that Mexican style restaurant flavor, use canned tomatoes.
- However, if you really want to use fresh tomatoes, it’s possible! You can use fresh tomatoes and simmer the salsa with a little cooking oil for about 15 minutes to get similar flavor. Using just fresh tomatoes, won’t give you this exact flavor though. If you want to use fresh, use about 1.25-1.5 lbs. of fresh Roma or San Marzano tomatoes for best results.
Ways To Serve My Salsa
This salsa is perfect with a big bowl of tortilla chips, but there are plenty of other delicious ways to use it. Spoon it over any tacos like my pulled pork tacos and carne asada tacos with marinated steak. In chicken burrito bowls, or pulled pork nachos for extra flavor. Add it to scrambled eggs or breakfast tacos, or Instant Pot pork carnitas. Or serve it as a snack along with some homemade salsa verde, homemade queso blanco, Mexican street corn salad and corn salsa. There’s no such thing as too much salsa!
More Salsa Recipes
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Homemade Salsa Recipe
Ingredients
- 28 oz fire roasted canned tomatoes
- 1/2 medium white onion
- 2 jalapeno peppers
- 2 garlic cloves
- 1 lime – juice only
- 1/3 cup fresh cilantro
- 1/2 tsp white granulated sugar
- 1 tsp salt more or less to taste
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1/2 tsp chipotle chili powder more or less to taste
Instructions
- Combine all the ingredients in a blender and pulse a few times until it's blended to small, coarse chunks. Don't make it too chunky because you don't' want to bite into a big piece of garlic or jalapeno.
- Serve right away to transfer into a glass jar with a lid and refrigerate.
Cooking Tortilla Chips (Optional):
- Frying: Use small taco corn tortillas and cut them into quarters. Preheat about 2 cups of oil in a skillet until it reaches 350°F. Set a wire rack inside a baking sheet and cover it with a paper towels to catch excess oil. Fry the tortilla pieces a few at a time, for a couple of minutes, until golden and crispy. Make sure to flip them half way through. Make sure to use metal tongs or metal spatula.
- Baking: Spread cut tortillas on a large metal baking sheet. Preheat the oven to 350°F and bake them for 5-6 minutes. Flip each tortilla chip and bake another 6-8 minutes.
Video
Notes
- For the best flavor, use canned whole tomatoes. Whole canned tomatoes, especially fire-roasted, give this salsa the most reliable restaurant-style taste and texture.
- Want to use fresh tomatoes instead? You can, but the salsa will taste lighter and less like classic restaurant salsa. If using fresh tomatoes, roast them first for deeper flavor.
- Control the heat with the jalapeños. Start with 1 jalapeño for mild salsa and add more to taste. For less heat, remove the seeds and veins first.
- Blend to your preferred texture. Pulse a few times for chunky salsa or blend longer for a smoother, more restaurant-style consistency.
- Let it rest before serving. The flavor gets better after chilling for 30 minutes to a few hours. This gives everything time to blend together.
- Taste after chilling. Cold salsa may need a little extra salt or lime juice just before serving.
- Storage: Keep salsa in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 4 days. Stir before serving.
- Freezing: You can freeze it, but the texture will soften after thawing. It works best thawed and stirred well before serving.
Nutrition
Originally published on Will Cook For Smiles in April 2021.
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Categories:
Appetizer Recipes, Cinco de Mayo Recipes, Dip Recipes, Gluten Free Recipes, Mexican and Tex-Mex Recipes, Mexican Appetizers, Most Popular Recipes, Super Bowl Recipes,All images and text ©Lyubov Brooke for ©Will Cook For Smiles. Please do not use my images without prior permission. If using my posts in collections and features, please link back to this post for the recipe.
Disclaimer: Nutrition information shown is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate as most ingredients and brands have variations.
Delicious! So easy to make and my family requests it weekly!
Wow! What a compliment! I am so glad you like the recipe so much!
Stop posting these mean comments! It’s not my fault you burnt yourself.
fr
I used fresh cut tomatoes and added garlic and it was fantastic.
Yum! I am so glad you liked the recipe!
WILL ROTEL WORK INSTEAD OF FIRE ROASTED?
I don’t think so, it would have a much different flavor since Rotel has other ingredients as well.
This is really tasty! I live in Arizona so we get a lot of good salsa and this one measures up. Couldn’t be any easier. I halved the recipe and my husband said I should have made the whole batch!
That’s such an amazing compliment, thank you! I’m so happy to hear it meets Arizona salsa standards! Sounds like your husband knows what’s up 😄 Next time, definitely go for the full batch!
I LOVE salsa thankyou for thé recipe⚘❤
I am so glad you liked the recipe, Marie!
We live in Texas- my son said, “Mom you have more than half the Mexican restaurants beat!”….and it only takes about 5 minutes to make! I wish I could take the credit…Very Yummy!
Oh my goodness, that’s the sweetest compliment! 🥰 Please thank your son for me, that totally made my day! I’m so glad you both loved it, and isn’t it amazing how quickly it comes together?!
Best salsa ever. I’ve made it 4 times in the past two weeks. So easy and quick. Amazing. Thank you for sharing.
Wow, thank you! I am so glad you liked it.
This salsa is soooo good! Your breath will smell terrible afterwards though 😂😅
Haha that’s true! I am so glad you liked it, Chrissy!
Only good reviews!
I used jalapeños that were Hot! So made another batch to mix together. Did the track to have it a bit more mild!
Is this able to be frozen?
I am so happy you liked it! Yes, you could freeze it but it may be a little thinner once it has thawed.
Terrific! Best one we have tried—
I am so glad you like it!
SOOO GOOD! Taste just like a restaurant’s style.
I am so happy to hear it turned out so well!
I got the ingredients, put it in the blender and made a mess, And it is the best salsa I ever had.!
Just the right amount of heat, my Wife likes it too.
This is my goto recipe.
thank you
So glad you liked it, Allen!
Overall it was a good base! I had to do quite a bit of modifications to make it how we like it.
I added a habanero pepper for more heat, and added quite a bit of garlic powder, chili powder, cumin and cayenne powder to deepen the flavors. It naturally has a light flavor to it, which is not a bad thing! We just tend to like richer flavor in our salsas!
I would definitely recommend this recipe though to anyone who wants to enjoy an easy homemade salsa 🙂
Thank you, Bailey!
I made this and it was all but inhaled! My jalapeño was not spicy so I added a little jalapeño powder for a kick and it was absolutely incredible. It has already been requested that I make this again
I am so glad you liked it, Cate!
Can you can this recipe as well?
I’m actually not sure. I’ve never tried canning before myself. Maybe someone with more canning experience could chime in, but I’m so glad you enjoyed the recipe!
This is really good! I made a couple modifications. I diced and sautéed the onion, garlic and jalapeño before adding to the tomatoes and other ingredients, then pulsed in a blender. Love the smokey flavor.
Yum! Glad you were able to modify it to your taste!
Lyuba what is the volume of salsa when you calculated the nutritional values?
The commercial salsas (about 10 different brands) that we buy show 2 tablespoons (30 ml.) at around 1 gm of sugar, 15 calories, 2 net carbs etc.
Please clarify how much salsa (in grams, or mls. or tablespoons ) corresponds to your nutritional numbers
Thank you – can’t wait to try it!
Hi Susan,
The nutritional information is for the whole bowl of salsa, I hope that helps and that you enjoy the recipe!