I just finished 11 half-pints of this chile salsa and I love it! I guess Ive never tasted a salsa with so many peppers in it (hot ones anyway). When I have cooked with Ro-Tels, I guess I never tasted the Ro-tel by itself, just in the finished recipe. So I can't compare. But I love this hot salsa. It will suit me just fine in the winter months where there is no fresh tomatoes and peppers for a Mexican dish. As is, I've been using canned whole tomatoes and pickled jalapenos for these meals. This salsa gives me those ingredients in one jar!

I made a really good, very hot one off of allrecipes.com. It's called Bob's Liquid fire . But I was thinking it would be delicious if you used some milder peppers such as jalapeno for part of the habaneros. Not that it's not good as is, but I did leave the mustard out of it. I diluted my sauce 50/50 with peach jam and used it as a glaze on some pork chops and they were DELICIOUS! YUM Here is a link that might be useful: liquid fire hot sauce

Thanks, that's what I figured too - since it was a long-cooked sauce, there weren't going to be any chunks left. Sorry Dave I had typed this, went to make dinner and just came back and hit Submit. I goofed (was checking the Ball Complete book for the original spices) and used the full 2C of vinegar for my half batch. So used 1/3C brown sugar and added another 2C tomato puree. We had a pint with a lb of ground meat for dinner, have 8C left in Pyrex measuring cup in fridge. The "puree" was pretty thin - as you can tell since my half recipe with an additional cup of vinegar and total 10C "puree" (2 additional cups, quickly nuked some paste tomatoes in a big Pyrex measuring cup, drained in a colander and topped with ice to peel them, then milled them into the measuring cup) made 5 pints, and that's with reducing the peppers and onions to less than half of the original recipe (that used 16C tomatoes). So a half batch should have been 8C peeled tomatoes, 4 bell peppers (app. 5C?), 3 onions (app. 2C), and 1C of vinegar to make 3.5 pints. I used 10C milled tomatoes, 3C peppers, 1 onion (slightly under 2C), and 2C vinegar and got 5 pints. I made sure the big chunks of onions (I roughly chopped them) were used for dinner, the peppers are in smaller pieces. Do you think it's safe to can the 4 pints I have left (after reheating of course)? I have adjusted the recipe in my Word document for the spices (Malna used a spice bag), I will go off that from now on so I don't get confused with looking at original amounts. And I think I'm going to change the white vinegar to ACV ;-) Sorry for the hijack. This post was edited by ajsmama on Sun, Sep 8, 13 at 18:34

I know this is a VERY old thread, but I had to share this. I spent quite some time trying to Google how to make Taco John's red sauce and I figured it out!! I decided to look at the ingredients on a Taco John's sauce packet and try to find something similar in ingredients at the store. Taco John's packet reads..... "Water, tomato paste, chili puree, jalapeno puree (jalapeno peppers, salt, acetic acid, vinegar), salt, sugar, citric acid, sodium benzoate as a preservative." There is a party dip called "Hell On The Red" that I found locally here in KC. It has just about everything Taco John's sauce has with the exception of the green chili puree. So.....I got some green chilis in a can to add. When I tasted Party Dip, to me it was too hot (even though it says mild) I decided to add a can of chopped tomatoes with green chilis (instead of the can of green chilis) with half of the jar of Party Dip. Put it in my little electric chopper thing and mulched it down to a sauce. I added like 1.5 teaspoon sugar and dashed some salt in there. Omg that's IT!!! My beloved Taco John's sauce! I made a beef super burrito and I was in heaven!!!