A few days ago I shared my my mother’s salsa recipe with you guys. Today, I’m going to share my father’s salsa recipe with you.

This spicy salsa is healthy, packed with flavor, and the most lovely shade of green. It is also gluten free, vegan, and free from the Top 8 Allergens.

The key to this salsa is roasting all of the veggies and garlic before puréeing them. This is what gives this salsa it’s uniquely rich flavor.

As written, this recipe is pretty hot, but if you don’t like it hot, don’t sweat it (pun intended)! You can seed your Serrano peppers, and/or decrease the amount of Serranos for a milder flavor.

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Before you start working on this salsa, you should remove the husks from your tomatillos, and give them a good rinse.

After your tomatillos are prepped, you need to seed your poblano. At that point your veggies will be ready for roasting.

The veggies are beautiful before roasting…

But they are really gorgeous once they’ve finished roasting.

Did I mention your kitchen will smell amazing when these are cooking?

Since the veggies are being roasted under the broiler, it is important that you check them frequently to avoid burning them. You will also need to turn the veggies once or twice to avoid sticking to your pan.

When preparing this recipe, the actual cooking times will vary, due to variations in size, ripeness, and moisture content of the produce. Oven temps may also differ slightly. For these reasons, I have not included an exact time for roasting your veggies in the recipe. It’s best to just know what to look for.

Specifically, you should roast the veggies until the peppers, and onions are starting to brown and blister, the tomatillos are golden, and starting to brown, and the garlic is browned. All veggies should be very tender at this point, as well.

Your tomatillos should look something like this:

Your garlic should look like this:

And your peppers will look about like this:

You will want to let all of the roasted ingredients rest, briefly, before proceeding to the next step. After they’ve had a moment to cool, the final step is to purée the roasted veggies, garlic, chopped cilantro, and all of the juices from the pan, until the mixture is mostly smooth. It is very important that you reserve the liquid from the pan, as this is where a lot of this salsa’s flavor comes from.

This is what the finished salsa will look like:

Isn’t it beautiful?

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Now for the recipe! 🙂

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Dad’s Salsa Verde

Ingredients:

-1 pound tomatillos, husked

-1 small onion, halved

-1 poblano pepper, halved and seeded

-2 Serrano peppers, whole *for a milder salsa, you may decrease the amount of Serrano’s, and/or seed them

-3-4 cloves garlic

-1/4 cup fresh cilantro, chopped

-juice from half a lime

-salt to taste

1.) Set oven to broil. Arrange tomatillos, peppers, onion, and garlic on an ungreased baking sheet. Roast in preheated oven for a few minutes, until veggies start to brown and blister. Turn veggies occasionally during cooking.

2.) Remove roasted vegetables and garlic from the oven, and allow to cool on pan.

3.) When peppers and onion are mostly cool, transfer onion, garlic, and peppers to the bowl of a blender or food processor. Add any liquid or dripping that may be left in the pan to the bowl as well.

4.) Puree roasted vegetables and drippings. Add cilantro, and blend until smooth.

5.) Transfer to a medium sized serving bowl. Stir in lime juice, and salt.

6.) Chill salsa in refrigerator until ready to serve.

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Looking for more allergy friendly salsa recipes? Check out this post for Mom’s Best Salsa recipe.

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