Salsa Verde or The Formula for any Salsa de Molcajete

I am showing how to make a salsa with tomatillos, roasted garlic, and chipotles. You could use the same formula, and use roasted tomatoes for the tomatillos, haban~eros for the chipotles, just fresh garlic instead of roasted garlic, etc. Use your imagination, as the Purple Lizard says. Just keep in mind that if you use tomatoes, you may need to add some lime juice to boost the acidity.

Proportions are to taste, because the intensity of flavor varies so much depending on where the thing was grown, when it was grown, how much water it had, etc.

1. The first step is to roast the tomatillos. First peel off the papery husks, and wash the sticky goo off of them. Put them, along with the unpeeled garlic cloves, in a pan and stick it into a 375 degree oven. If you are using fresh chilies, roast them, too. If you are using dried chilis, toast them, then rehydrate them, but generally dried cilies go into fried salsas, so we will discuss their handling in the upcoming entry for enchilada sauce:

2. Grind up a couple of cloves of fresh garlic with some salt in your molcajete. Now, you might think that you can do this in any order, but any Mexican cook will tell you that you must do things in this order (if you are substituting ingredients, just substitute the ingredient in the proper place). If you have never used your molcajete, you will need to season it by grinding up some dry rice in it and throwing it out and repeating until there are no more little bits of rock and black sand in it:

3. As the tomatillos soften (you want them to be mushy), remove them from the oven:

4. Now, grind up your chilis, in this case chipotles (with a little splash of the adobo they were packed in):

5. Add the roasted tomatillos and grind them up with the rest:

6. Taste, correct for salt, fire, acidity (you will probably have no problems with enough acidity using tomatillos). Ready for chips!

Of course, this is the salsa I use to simmer chicharrones in. Just heat up a small pan of this, add pork rinds and a little splash of chicken stock and cook until the rinds are soft. Serve on hot corn tortillas with freshly chopped onion and cilantro. Accompany with ice cold beer and some conjunto music!

Posted by erik at March 9, 2007 11:59 AM