Salsa (redux)

I was gifted a whole bunch of peppers this year.  Unfortunately, I was also extremely busy and I ended up letting a lot of them go bad.  I figured it was put up or shut up time with them, and there happened to be a damn good deal on tomatillos at my local grocer.

So, since I was too lazy to make a chile, I decided to make a good salsa verde.  When making green sauces, I always find a combination of fresh and cooked flavors work wonders.  The easiest way to achieve that balance is by roasting some of the ingredients.  I generally roast peppers I use in anything, but I also decided to step out on a limb and roast the garlic I wanted to use as well.

Anyway, the first thing you have to do with tomotillos is pull the heavy fibrous leaf off of them.  

The etymology of tomatillos is misleading.  The dimminutive suffix of “illo” suggests that they are just a small tomato. While a member of the nightshade family, tomatillos are in a separate genus.  The flavor differs greatly from that of a tomato.  They have a very crisp citrus fruit sort of flavor.  The name tomatillo could also vary by region.  A ripe fruit will be a pale green to yellow around here, but could be red or purple if you have varieties originating farther away from Mexico.

I put the peppers, a selection of bell, serrano, jalapeno, and anaheim peppers (all gifted to me by women with gardens) on a cookie sheet and placed them under the broiler.  I retained a couple jalapenos to give a nice raw and fresh flavor to the finished product.  It takes about ten minutes on a side to properly roast the peppers. You want the waxy skin of the chiles to turn black and separate from the pepper.

Notice the garlic as well.  The smell of the peppers roasting is a perfect and ambrosial thing. I’m not sure this step is necessary, but while the peppers and garlic roasted, I parched the tomas.  I really don’t think this is required, but that’s how I was taught to treat them.  It’s a flash boil, no longer than about thirty seconds.  It may just be to knock off the weird gooey stuff all over them or it may be to scare off the calyx demons.  See, I learned how to make green chile over a charcoal fire in Juarez trained by a toothless mute witch at midnight under a full moon.  Not really, I learned from a girl in LA I was dating.  I’m not even sure she was all the way Mexican.  Story for another time, my friend.

So, from the roasting pan, put the chiles into a freezer bag and place them in the freezer.  The hot, steamy peppers will actually steam the skin off of each other while they’re in there.  Then you have to peel the wax off.  At this point, you could vane and seed the chiles if you want.  The capsaicin, the chemical heat of the pepper, is mostly stored there.  Capsaicin is a natural antifungal that protects the all important next generation of the species by making the environment toxic to any small organism, such as bugs or worms or infectious bacteria and fungi, but edible (though sometimes painful) for anything large enough to consume the pepper and spread the seed.  I left the vanes and seeds in, except for the bell.  

So, this is the final set of ingredients laid out.

 

From there it’s a pretty straight forward process.  Throw the tomatillos, bell peppers, and anaheims and garlic in the blender and set it to chop with about a tablespoon or two of cider vinegar and a pinch of sugar.  Don’t go crazy with the blender.  You want to maintain a nice medium grain sort of consistency.  After about a minute, maybe, I dumped the rest of the peppers in with a lime’s worth of juice and gave it another minute or so of chopping.  It makes for a nice combination of well chopped and lightly chopped.  

The last thing to do was knife chop up about a half cup of cilantro and stir it in. I added a little cumin, too.  Not much, just enough to really work with the smokiness of the peppers.  So, to break it all down:

One pound of tomatillos

Four Anaheim

Five Jalapenos (big ones)

Four Serannos 

Cilantro, a little vinegar, garlic, and cumin.  

That’s it.

Now, this is what it looked like:

So, looks good.  Looks good as hell.  So I loaded up a chip with the stuff. Took a bite.  

Now I’m tough, but go back and read the list of ingredients.  This shit is a chemical weapon.  I wanted to cry.  It was painful.  Eyes watering, nose snotting up, etc.  The flavor was perfect and it took a while for the heat to build, but once it did, it was like licking the butthole of the sun.  Plus side: clear sinuses.  

So there you go, I have a quart of the stuff now.  I may cut it a little more with the vinegar and sugar to knock the heat down, I don’t know.