Homemade Tomatillo Salsa

Tangy, spicy and so much better than the store-bought kind, this homemade tomatillo salsa is a fantastic addition to just about any Tex-Mex meal. The first thing you’ll notice about this type of salsa verde is its green color: It’s made from roasted tomatillos, onion, chilis, garlic and cilantro. This green sauce also doubles as a dip or dressing, and it’s perfect for spicing up almost any meal. Serve it with fried eggs, grilled steak, as a sauce for chicken enchiladas, or with your favorite type of taco. And of course, you could always just eat it with tortilla chips for dipping. You can’t go wrong!

Are salsa verde and tomatillo salsa the same thing?

Salsa verde is a broad term for "green sauce" that comes in all different varieties depending on where in the world it’s made. This tomatillo salsa is just one of many salsa verdes. Unlike red salsa which gets its color from red tomatoes, homemade tomatillo salsa uses green tomatillos as the base.

How do you make tomatillo salsa from scratch?

The first thing you need to do is prep the tomatillos! A little background: Tomatillos are a small fruit (found in the produce aisle) and look like green tomatoes, but are wrapped in a papery husk. To make the salsa, remove the husk and rinse any stickiness from the skin. If they are super small, you can leave them whole, or halve larger ones, for roasting. Onion and serrano chili peppers get roasted along with the tomatillos until everything is soft and charred–this concentrates the flavor and helps evaporate some of the liquid in the veggies to make a thick salsa. The rest is easy! Add some fresh ingredients, like lime juice and lots of cilantro to keep things bright, then pulse it all together in the food processor.