Oven Roasted Tomato Salsa – Salsa Roja Asada

I love doing quick fixes and may be because of that I am more of a pico di gallo girl. Just chop it up and I am all done. However, for my Mexican dinner night a couple of weeks ago, I decided to go to a road less traveled by me. I decided to make salsa out of oven roasted vegetables.

This salsa roja asada will fall right in the middle of pico di gallo (absolutely uncooked) and charred/burned vegetable salsa, and will taste more like salsa de molcajete (except you grind salsa in a food processor rather than a mortar and pestle).

Oven Roasted Tomato Salsa Recipe

You Would Need

1 pound tomatoes (or around 6-8 small-to-medium-sized tomatoes)

1 medium-sized onion

9-10 garlic cloves (My garlic bulb was really small. If using a bigger-sized bulb, 4-5 cloves should be enough)

Fresh or pickled peppers (either jalapeno or serrano or I have used here a hot variety of banana peppers). Decide number of peppers according to the heat you are comfortable with. For normal hotness, use 1 pepper. Increase the number as per requirement.

1/3 cup finely chopped cilantro

Juice from 1/2 lime

Olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

How to Go About It

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Slice tomatoes and onions in a baking dish. Add in peeled garlic cloves.

For best results, you should try to line them up so that they do not overlap. I work with what I’ve got; my baking oven space is little so I had to just put them together.

If you are adding fresh chile/peppers, slice them and add them now. I am using pickled ones to I will add them just 10 minutes before I take vegetables out of the oven.

Toss in generous amount of olive oil and salt and pepper to taste.

Sneak in the garlic cloves inside tomatoes flesh. This will ensure that they get cooked without getting burned and tasting bitter hence.

Bake for vegetables for 10 minutes. Take out the dish and shuffle the vegetables so that all sides get roasted. If you are using a baking dish like me, just gently toss the vegetables. If you have lined your vegetables, flip them using a tong.

At this time I also added my sliced pickled peppers.

Oven roast for another 10 minutes on the same temperature.

When you take them out, they should look like this

Wrinkled skins, change in color with a light touch of roasted black color on them.

If you are not satisfied with your roasting, go ahead and roast for another 5 minutes.

Let the vegetables cool down a little.

Toss all of the vegetables in a food processor or blender and pulse it a couple of times. The consistency you are looking for is a little course and a little chunky smooth sauce.

Stir in cilantro and lime juice. Do a taste check and see if it requires any more salt and pepper.

The tomatoes that I get here at this time of the season aren’t deep red in color but more of orange-red, so they gave the same color to the salsa. These tomatoes might be orange-red but they are packed with a very unique flavor which was really brought out by roasting them.