LACTO FERMENTED SALSA | Pico De Gallo Salsa Recipe | Easy-Simple-Delicious!

Hi there! Today's video is on a lacto-fermented garden fresh salsa, pico de gallo. Who doesn't love a garden fresh salsa? All of my ingredients here are freshly picked from my garden but if you don't have a garden, no worries. Organic produce from your grocery store will work just fine and it will still be delicious. And the bonus to this garden fresh salsa is it's loaded and packed with probiotics. If you're into the lacto-fermenting lifestyle or are just getting into it, check out some of my other lacto-fermenting vegetable videos such as this raw sauerkraut video I did and I've also got others such as fermenting bell peppers, kale, mushrooms. I'll leave links to all those videos in the description below. Alright, let's jump into it and make ourselves some garden fresh salsa. To get started, let's go over the ingredients that we'll be putting into our pico de gallo salsa today. Alright, obviously we're going to want to start with some tomatoes. Nice, ripe, soft, not rotting, soft. And you can use any type of tomato you want. I've got this beautiful heirloom tomato here that I'll be using but I've also got aroma here that's going to be tossed in. So you pick the tomato, just ripe and juicy is best. Next, we've got the onion here. You can use any color you want. If you're a spicy fan, you'll need one jalapeno and if you're not a spicy fan, a great substitute is a bell pepper. I'm personally not a spicy fan so I always go for the bell pepper. And if you are a spicy person, you don't have to use a jalapeno. You can use any type of hot pepper you want. Next, we have one fresh ear of corn. If you don't have fresh corn available to you, frozen should be okay. Next, we've got some fresh cilantro and finally a good natural salt. You can use a sea salt, which I'm going to use this today, or you can use a Himalaya pink salt as well. Really the important thing is is that it's a natural salt and a clean salt. Make sure by reading the ingredients there's no additional anti-caking agents added to it. Don't use a bleach salt or a salt that's been mineral stripped. It just adds that nutritional value to your ferment when you've got the natural minerals from your natural salt into your natural lacto fermentation. So let's get chopping and I'll show you how to put this recipe together and ferment it. We're going to start with dicing up the tomatoes and this is my big beautiful heirloom. And you see this stuff on the bottom? Don't use any tomato skin that has this. You want to cut these parts out and use the good flesh. And also, as you're cutting things up, make sure that everything is freshly washed, like your cutting board, your knives, the bowl, the measuring cups. Washing everything freshly with hot soapy water, including your hands, just ensures that we will be growing the good stuff and there won't be any bad bacteria contamination. There's really no rules to the size of tomato dicing that you want to do. Just a nice medium-sized dice will work. All in all, we're going to want three cups of these diced tomatoes. And just a little note here, see this inner core of the tomato? You want to cut that out. If any of your tomatoes have skin with some bad spots on it, cut that off, just like I did here. Again, you don't want stuff like that in your ferment. Okay, so with all this leftover tomato juice, we're going to just pour it in to the tomatoes. We want to save as much of that juice as possible, because the tomatoes are going to be making their own brine with the sea salt instead of needing to add a supplemental brine. So save that juice. Take that three cups of tomatoes and add it to your mixing bowl. Next, let's chop up our cilantro. We're going to want about one cup here. Predominantly, just chop up the leaves and the stems can go in the compost. And keep in mind these measurements are not exact. If you have just half a cup or two-thirds cup available to you, then that'll work just fine. So one cup is just a generalization. Take that cilantro, add it to the mixing bowl, and let's chop up our pepper. This is my beautiful garden green pepper. If you're doing bell pepper like I am because you're just not a spicy person, then you'll want about one-third cup of the diced pepper. Be sure to cut out the fleshy stuff and the seeds. Toss your peppers into the mixing bowl. And next, let's get our corn unshucked. And if you don't have the fresh corn, like I said earlier, you can do frozen. See that lovely corn silk on there? Don't toss it. I did a video on the health benefits of corn silk and then also gave some tips on how to consume it with tea or on your salad. If you missed that video on corn silk, you want to check that out. You'll never want to throw this stuff out again. So I'm just going to set mine aside at the moment since it's not going in the salsa. Now you're just going to cut the corn off right into the salsa mix. And set that aside. Let's get into chopping our onion. I always save onion for last because my eyes are so sensitive to the fumes, but I can't avoid it any longer. We have to get into it. We'll want about one-third of a cup of chopped onion. Be sure to peel the thick skin off. In the ferment, it's just kind of papery and doesn't break down very well. So you want the fleshy tender stuff underneath. Okay, take that onion, add it to the mixing bowl. And just a little tip, if you put your onion in the fridge a few hours to overnight before you chop it, you actually don't get the fumes in your eyes. But my onion was just picked from my garden so that wasn't an option because I wanted to get right into filming this video. But in the future, if you're sensitive to those onion fumes like I am, fridge it first. And the last ingredient we're going to add is the lime juice. What you're going to do is you're just going to cut up an entire lime and put the juice from the whole lime into the mix. Once those lime wedges are squeezed in, then toss the salsa mixture till all the ingredients are incorporated evenly throughout. Hear that juicy slurp? That's a good sound. Next, you're going to load the salsa mixture into a freshly washed glass quart or liter sized jar. Don't pour it in all at once, do it in segments so that you can use your hand or a mallet to push the mixture down to get the air bubbles out. Don't crush the tomatoes with too much strength, just moderately press to move the air out. You want the juice to be coming up and over the mixture just like what you're seeing here. Once the jar is nearly full and what's left in the mixing bowl is mostly liquid, go ahead and pour the remains into the jar. Now add the salt atop the mixture. As far as how much salt, that depends on if you're using a coarse salt like the Celtic sea salt that I'm using or a fine salt. They do not weigh the same and therefore can't be the same measurement across the board for each. A tablespoon of fine salt would be way too salty and a half tablespoon of coarse salt wouldn't be enough, so refer to the measurement shown here regarding the type of salt you're using. For a coarse grain salt, use one tablespoon or 12 grams. For a fine grain salt, use half a tablespoon or eight grams. I wish I would have put this information in some of my other fermenting videos, but hopefully late is better than never. So you can just use your finger to push the salt down to be under the liquid, but don't worry about mixing it all the way through. The salt will do that job on its own. Next, place a fermenting weight atop to hold the salsa ingredients under the salty tomato juice, aka the brine. I'm using this glass fermenting weight that I got off of Amazon. You can get a four or an eight pack inexpensively and they're pretty handy. I'll leave a link in the description below if you're interested. Lastly, place a breathable lid on top. I always just use a coffee filter. It keeps the debris out while allowing the CO2 gases to escape. Then I use a jar ring to hold it all down. What you're going to do now is place this on your countertop for just 24 hours. That's all tomatoes really need for a nice ferment. I've experimented with leaving it on my counter for longer, such as two days and three days, and I found that the best flavor and texture and the juice quality is best after just 24 hours. I'll see you tomorrow after the 24-hour ferment and we'll take a little taste test, see how it turned out, and I'll let you know what to do from there. Remove the lid, take out the weight, and here it is. Looks really good, smells amazing. I'm going to put this on the plate here and take a little taste test. I can tell from the way it looks and the amazing smell it's going to taste so good. For storage, place the lid on and put it in your fridge. Don't let this sit too long in the fridge. You want to eat it within three to five days. Unlike other ferments that can last months or even years, this one is a short termer. Really eat it up in three to five days for best flavor. I hope this salsa recipe has inspired you and gives you another treat to make with your maters when they're fresh from the vine from your garden instead of maybe always making sauce all the time. Be sure to check out my other videos right here on fermenting vegetables. I've also got a playlist on my channel if you want to see all my videos on fermenting. I'd love to have you be a part of my channel, Clean Food Living, so consider hitting that subscribe button and I'll see you next time. Have a great day. Bye.