This is our standard-issue Mexican salsa verde recipe and one of our favorite sauces eaten raw or cooked.
This is the green sauce you may see in the salsa bar at your local taqueria.
Mexican Salsa Verde is a spicy green sauce dating back to the Aztec Empire. It is based on green tomatillos and chili peppers.
This recipe is for a raw sauce, but we also like to roast some or all of the ingredients on a comal for a cooked version. But don’t just eat it with chips or on tacos and burritos. You can use it for cooking, too! Chili Verde is essentially hunks of pork, stewed in prepared salsa verde.
Salsas are traditionally smashed and ground using a Molcajete – the Mexican mortar and pestle, also dating back to the Aztec.
We are all about convenience, so we usually enlist our blender to pulse the ingredients until we reach the desired consistency. Besides, we still don’t own a Molcajete right now. We steep the onions in some water to remove the bite and add them at the end.
For a sweeter, smoother variation, try our Salsa Verde with Avocado recipe. The only difference is we substitute an avocado for the onion. But this simple, single ingredient swap makes for two distinctively different sauces. Most taquerias stock both versions in their salsa bars.
Consume this verdant sauce right away. Store it in the refrigerator, up to a week, but best scooped straight from the molcajete or salsa dish.
Mexican Salsa Verde
Equipment
- Molcajete or Blender
Ingredients
- 1 lb tomatillos husked, washed, and coarsely chopped
- 2 ea jalapeño or serrano chiles stemmed, de-seeded and coarsely chopped (keep some seeds if you want it very spicy)
- 3 ea garlic cloves peeled, coarsely chopped
- 1/4 cup cilantro leaves save the stems for another use
- 1/2 ea onion medium sized, small dice
- 2 tsp kosher or sea salt to taste
Instructions
- Soak the diced onions in a bowl of cold water while putting the rest of the salsa together.
- In the molcajete or blender, combine the tomatillos, chiles, garlic, and cilantro. Process to a coarse puree. Pour into a salsa dish.
- Drain the onions and stir them into the salsa.
- Taste and season with salt, then serve immediately with chips or to spoon over your tacos or use as an alternative to salad dressing.