Tomatillos are sufficiently unavailable in the UK that spellcheck flags the word as an error, but as it turns out, they actually grow fine, especially undercover. I know this, because I currently have a couple of large tomatillo plants that are covered in fruit, which I don’t really know what to do with. I mean, I know not to eat the papery bit and to wash the sticky stuff off, but after that it all gets bit vague.
I’ve made one batch of salsa, slightly hampered by the fact that I didn’t want to add a big bunch of soap coriander, or as you would probably say, cilantro to it, which all the recipes I could find insisted one must do. It was nice, but if the plants keep going as they are, there’s going to be a couple of kilos more coming and there’s a limit to the salsa I can eat, soap or no. Online recipes that I can find are somewhat limited, mainly slight variations on the recipe I already tried.
I do know one Mexican guy who’s taking some, but I’d also like to try some myself, and for various reasons right now is not a good time to be pestering him for recipes, so I thought I’d ask the Dope.
Vegetarian recipes especially appreciated, seeing as it’s been a couple of decades since I ate meat. Anyone got any good suggestions? They can’t just be good for salsa, right?
You can make a nice enchilada glop with pepper jack, jalapeno, cilantro(hah!), flame roasted tomatillos and a handful of masa. We make it with chicken, but beans would work fine. No set amounts of any of this, just freeform.
I sometimes use them for hot sauce. They make a nice base which is less acidic than tomatoes (and with fewer pesky seeds).
I’m with you. In the US coriander generally refers to the seeds (which don’t bother me) and cilantro refers to the leaves, (which taste exactly like fragrant dish soap).
Don’t let anybody or any cookbook bully you into using cilantro. I live in South Texas, the epicenter of Tex-Mex cuisine, and I always ask in Mexican restaurants if something has cilantro in it and if it does and they can’t skip it or remove it (like in soup for example), I don’t order it. Of course it also turns up in Indian and Thai cuisine.
Use Google to find a recipe for green enchiladas aka enchiladas verdes. Cooked chicken filling inside rolled up corn tortillas. Baked with white cheese on top, usually monterey jack or something similar. Can you get good corn tortillas where you are? If you find a recipe with cilantro, just ignore the cilantro. I always like green enchiladas with lots of sour cream on top at the end. The ice cold sour cream contrast with the spicy sauce in a very nice way.
Here’s one that’s probably more complicated than you want, but you can probably streamline it.
You can omit the cilantro/coriander from any salsa recipe. It’ll be fine.
There are lots of recipes for mole verde on line, but most of them call for ingredients that would be hard to find in the UK (like epazote and hulled pumpkin seeds).
Here’s a recipe that doesn’t call for any exotic ingredients:
Mushrooms in Green Sauce
1 1/2 tablespoons pork lard or safflower oil
1/4 medium white onion, thinly sliced
1/2 pound mushrooms, well washed and thickly sliced
2 chiles serranos or any hot, fresh green chiles, cut into thin strips
1/8 teaspoon cumin seeds
8 small tomatillos
1 clove of garlic
1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste
Remove the husks from the tomatillos. Rinse the tomatillos in cold water, then put them in a saucepan with cold water to cover. Simmer until the tomatillos are soft and the skins are tender, about 15 to 20 minutes, turning them from time to time to ensure they cook evenly. Don’t boil, or the tomatillos will split open.
Crush the cumin, then blend along with the tomatillos and garlic until smooth.
Heat the lard or oil and fry the onion, without browning, until soft. Add the mushrooms and chiles and fry for a few seconds more, stirring all the time.
Add the blended tomatillo mixture and the salt to the pan. Fry a few seconds longer. Cover the pan and cook over low heat until the mushrooms are tender (about 20 minutes).
Pumpkin seeds are easy to find here- epazote… heh, no. It’s actually already on my list of things to try and to grow next year though.
What we annoyingly can’t get, at least in this area, is decent chillies. Dried, yes, but the fresh selection is dismal, pretty much just some mystery bag labelled ‘Chillies’, sometimes with a ‘mild’ or ‘hot’ on the bag. Rarely any named varieties and often only red. I can’t even grow 'em here because the season’s too short, especially as I’m in Scotland.
On the other hand, I am planning on a fairly big road trip in the near future, I’m heading down to an area with a much better ethnic foods selection, and there are Mexican specialist food shops in Edinburgh and Glasgow. If I go with a shopping list for stuff that will keep I can probably find most things. Except fresh epazote.
There are two shops that sell some Indian foods, and one Chinese/miscellaneous Asian but although the shelf-stable selection is fine, the fresh selection is really limited. I think it’s a combo of towns here being a bit too spaced out and too far from the ports/airports where stuff’s brought in, so it’s just distribution being too expensive. Glasgow/Edinburgh is better, but outside of that, IMO the selection is pretty dire.
Even smaller towns I’ve lived in in England had a better selection than round here, and I miss my old Bristol local grocery store more than I ever thought I’d miss a shop.
Well, then you just need some masa flour and a tortilla press. Ok, maybe that’s not the best advice, but they’re really not too hard to make yourself. I buy already pressed raw ones that I cook up in a skillet, but I used to make my own and I swear they’re not that hard. Just be sure to press them really thin.
Well, if you can grow tomatillos, peppers are even easier. It’s just a question of which ones you want to grow. I suggest some poblanos and jalapenos.
As for what to do with your tomatillos, I suggest green chile pork guisada. It of course, requires green chiles. This recipe is pretty close to the one we use, but we simmer the pork until it’s falling apart. Omit the cilantro if ya prefer.
ETA: Oh, and you can use canned green chiles for most recipies!
Not here they’re not! They need a longer growing season, more sun and warmer nights than we reliably get You can manage it further South, but here you need heat and light at both ends of the season and they’re still unreliable- lots of faff for maybe a couple of fruit. Really, I have tried. Canned chillies are also not really available except jalapeno slices.
I’ll omit the whole dish I’m afraid, as I’m vegetarian, and last I checked pigs were not a vegetable.
This doesn’t take a huge number of tomatillos, but it takes a fair amount. And it’s fantastic. Not spicy or particularly weird flavored either. And I think since you’ve already got the tomatillos, everything else should be pretty simple to get in the UK, at least based on what I recall in British grocery stores. Maybe there’s a way to modify it for vegetarian purposes? That’s going to be tough though; Mexico and the other tomatillo places (Texas, California) aren’t super vegetarian.
I’ve been interested for awhile in making a salsa or green enchilada sauce out of tomatillos-- I make fresh tomato salsa all the time (I haven’t purchased jarred salsa in years). So this thread is interesting to me, but I don’t really know much about tomatillos myself-- so I’m taking more from it than I’ll be able to contribute (which, sadly, seems to be the case with a lot of threads ).
I will offer this tip to the OP:
Yes, my wife hates cilantro/coriander, so I substitute Mexican oregano. Regular oregano works fine too, but the Mexican variety (which is similar in flavor but actually an unrelated plant), has a little more of a ‘kick’ to it, and works very well in salsas.
Sadly Mexican oregano is completely unavailable in the UK so far as I’ve been able to find.. Maybe it can be found dried in a speciality shop, but that’s it.
I’m a bit of a fan of unusual herbs and other plants, so I’ve actually already tried to hunt it down as a few online recipes suggested it. Got normal oregano though. And Cuban oregano.
I bought a big container of Mexican oregano on Amazon.
Yeah, again, normal oregano works perfectly fine in salsas. I used it for years before I picked up Mexican oregano.
Cuban oregano? I was not even aware this existed! According to Google, it’s yet a third distinct plant, from a different botanical family, than the others (though it is related to the mint family, as is normal oregano). Thanks for clueing me in to another oregano variety!
Look, we conquered the world for spices, that’s as far as our involvement with the things go. Give us something beige, bland and deep fried, OK?
I kid ye not, my great-aunt, who lived with us when I was small, never even tried tomatoes until she was in her late 70s, because she didn’t really trust them.
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