This is the best 5 minute restaurant style homemade salsa recipe! It is fresh, flavorful and easy to make. You’ll never buy salsa again and you might find yourself eating it every night!
Best Homemade Salsa Recipe
This post has been a long time coming. It’s no laughing matter to set out to make the Best Homemade Salsa Recipe. It all started years ago when my friend, Krysta, made the most delicious homemade salsa EVER.
What’s the key? Oh, friend let me tell you…
Restaurant Salsa Recipe
A restaurant salsa is not big and chunky, that’s a pico de gallo. No, this easy salsa recipe is actually more similar to what you’d pour out of a jar with 100% better flavor.
What makes it a restaurant salsa? Two things:
- Canned Fire Roasted Tomatoes
- Blending versus strictly chopping the ingredients.
Oh Sweet Basil Pro Tip
If you live anywhere like we do, fresh tomatoes might not be super easy to get all year round, however they do make for the best salsa.
Let’s break it down even more so that you can be successful whether at the grocery store or at the farmer’s market.
Which Tomatoes are Best for Salsa?
When making a homemade salsa like our chunky tomato salsa you can use a variety of tomatoes, but for a restaurant style salsa you’re going to want to stick to Roma Tomatoes.
How to Pick Good Tomatoes
- Tight Skin- Look for tomatoes with really tight, smooth skin, no wrinkles as that’s a sign of withering from age.
- Coloring- Even coloring without yellow or orange or green marks means it ripened on the vine as it should.
- Weight- The heavier the tomato the better! This is the most important of all. Pick it up and resist squeezing it. The more often you feel tomatoes the better you’ll get at feeling the weight.
Should You Add Sugar to Salsa?
A dash of sugar is used to balance the acidity of the tomatoes which often comes from using store-bought vs garden tomatoes.
Salsa Ingredients
While you can use all canned items (not the onion) for salsa, I’ve found that a combination of fresh and canned works the best for a copycat Mexican restaurant salsa recipe. I think that’s because the canned tomatoes add a more thick and saucy salsa versus a pico de gallo like salsa.
Here’s what we use for Mexican Salsa: