Short story was I set out to replicate (somewhat) a garlic-forward salsa recipe. I messed up the garlic measurements. The recipe called for four cloves of garlic; I misread that and put in four HEADS of garlic.
The rest of the recipe, I sort of improvised … just off the top of my head (because I didn’t write it down and just kind of go by feel) …
4 fresh tomatoes
1 whole red onion
1 whole white onion
Lots of garlic (I’ve settled on 1-2 whole heads now, depending on size)
1/2 cup white wine
1/4 - 1/2 cup Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup Valentina hot sauce, black label … cheap Mexican-style sauce you can buy for like $2 at most any grocery store
4 serrano peppers (seeds and all)
2 jalapeno peppers (seeds and all)
2 habanero peppers (seeds and all)
1/4 cup - 1/2 cup of your favorite dry Cajun seasoning mix and/or red pepper flake
Fresh cilantro, as little or as much as you want
1 tablespoon each of basil, parsley and marjoram
1-2 tablespoons each of paprika and smoked paprika
Salt to taste
Cut the tops off the tomatoes and onions and then quarter them or slice them. Put it all in a blender and go for it. Start with the biggest items and work down; one tomato at a time until you’ve liquefied it, then add the next, etc., then the onions, then the peppers. Typical issue for me is I’ll have more stuff in the blender than the blender can hold. This will produce a thin-bodied salsa (on purpose! – I abhor really thick salsas) that has the consistency of the stuff you usually find in a family Mexican restaurant.
If it’s not thin enough, add more white wine (I usually use a reisling, or a moscato for a bit of sweetness) to thin it out. The tomatoes will have a shocking amount of water in them. Even the onions will produce some.
Again, play with the ingredients, add more of this or less of that. When you get done, you’ll know if you got it right by how much pain that garlic will cause you. Garlic has some sneaky hotness on its own, and it reacts with a lot of the other ingredients on this list and sort of self-amplifies its own heat. Dip chips in it, refrigerate what you don’t immediately eat.
Word of warning: It gets more intense after a night in the fridge, and you’re going to “ruin” the taste of your other meals for a day or so afterward because the garlic is going to stick with you. This isn’t so much a food, as it is an exercise in stamina.
