Roasted Tomatillo Salsa Verde

We have a new favorite recipe for fresh garden ingredients and it’s roasted tomatillo salsa verde!

This recipe is the perfect compliment on taco night which has become a regular occurrence in our house. It’s hard coming up with recipes and a full meal plan for the week that works for the whole family. But, we’ve found that our kids really enjoy themed nights and it makes it easier to plan when building out the shopping list for the week.  I know we are going to hit on some of our popular themes: taco night, pasta night, grill night, soup night, casserole night.

 

Mexican or taco night has been the most popular theme so far and it’s great because we’ve developed a variety of recipes that we all love:

• cod fish tacos
• fish taco sauce
• chipotle shrimp tacos
• guacamole
• homemade taco sauce
• quinoa fajita casserole

We can now add this roasted tomatillo salsa verde to the list!  It’s a great standalone appetizer with some tortilla chips or goes great on a tacos, fajitas, scramble eggs, and lots of other things.

So…

What is salsa verde?

If you’ve ever wondered what salsa verde is, it’s basically salsa made with tomatillos instead of tomatoes.  I think I always just assumed it was made from green tomatoes, but that is not traditionally the case…traditionally Mexican salsa verde is made with tomatillos. You can use green tomatoes in a salsa, of course, but tomatillos are the ingredient more traditionally used in salsas and sauces.

Some people think that green tomatoes and tomatillos are the same, but in fact, they aren’t. While they are both from the nightshade family, this article highlights the differences between tomatillos and green tomatoes.

 

We made this salsa verde almost weekly during the summer.  It all started when I got a large container of tomatillos from a friend with a much greener thumb than I (we actually have some in the garden, but they got a late start and didn’t do very well).  I made a version without roasting or cooking the tomatillos, then a version without poblanos, then this version where we roasted the tomatillos, peppers, garlic, and onion and it was amazing.  We had a taco night with friends and they wholeheartedly agreed!

The roasting of the tomatillos and vegetables adds an extra step to the prep, but it’s easy and oh so worth it (I think). But any way you slice it, dice it, or roast it, we’re adding this salsa verde recipe to the keeper pile.

We haven’t tried canning batches of this salsa verde yet, but we definitely are going to in the future. We’ll likely turn to some of the tips you can find here on canning salsa.

Recipe details below! If you try it out we’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Did you roast your tomatillos? Did you try canning any batches?