Uploaded October 2018 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
This is a simple roasted tomatillo salsa recipe. The ingredients are 3 and 1/2 pounds of fresh tomatillos, 10-12 ounces of fresh red ripe Hatch or Anaheim type chile peppers, a large onion (or equivalent) and a head of fresh garlic, salt, and honey to taste.
The primary feature of this recipe is the roasting of all the main ingredients under the broiler to carmelize and blacken them. This brings out some wonderful smoky flavors and results in tiny char flecks in the finished salsa. For heat, the recipe uses low-heat Hatch type chiles. These chiles are hottest, sweetest, and impart the most flavor (and color) when they are extremely red-ripe. By using these low heat chiles, in order to produce significant heat levels in the salsa you have to use quite a few of them, which results in great roasted chile flavor and a significant red tint to the "salsa verde".
Since I am canning the salsa in this video, I do not bother adding any cilantro. Cilantro is a wonderful ingredient in a fresh salsa, and if we were making this salsa as a fresh batch for immediate use, we would have added it. But it doesn't impart any flavor to a canned batch of salsa after cooking and processing the flavor is essentially destroyed.
The National Institutes of Health have studied tomatillos safety in canned goods and determined that any recipe including 50% or more tomatillos will have sufficient acidity to be safely water bath canned. Here is the study link. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9839810
This is a simple roasted tomatillo salsa recipe. The ingredients are 3 and 1/2 pounds of fresh tomatillos, 10-12 ounces of fresh red ripe Hatch or Anaheim type chile peppers, a large onion (or equivalent) and a head of fresh garlic, salt, and honey to taste.
The primary feature of this recipe is the roasting of all the main ingredients under the broiler to carmelize and blacken them. This brings out some wonderful smoky flavors and results in tiny char flecks in the finished salsa. For heat, the recipe uses low-heat Hatch type chiles. These chiles are hottest, sweetest, and impart the most flavor (and color) when they are extremely red-ripe. By using these low heat chiles, in order to produce significant heat levels in the salsa you have to use quite a few of them, which results in great roasted chile flavor and a significant red tint to the "salsa verde".
Since I am canning the salsa in this video, I do not bother adding any cilantro. Cilantro is a wonderful ingredient in a fresh salsa, and if we were making this salsa as a fresh batch for immediate use, we would have added it. But it doesn't impart any flavor to a canned batch of salsa after cooking and processing the flavor is essentially destroyed.
The National Institutes of Health have studied tomatillos safety in canned goods and determined that any recipe including 50% or more tomatillos will have sufficient acidity to be safely water bath canned. Here is the study link. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9839810
