Roy Choi’s Salsa Verde Recipe: Tips for Making Salsa Verde

Roy Choi is a celebrated chef widely known throughout the culinary industry as the godfather of the gourmet food truck movement. The 2008 launch of Kogi, his Korean Mexican food truck in LA, blew up the boundaries between fancy restaurant cuisine and street food and put Roy on the map as one of the most original chefs in the United States. Kogi’s wild success was only the start of Roy’s culinary revolution.

In the years since, he’s opened nearly a dozen acclaimed restaurants, including Kogi Taqueria in Los Angeles and Best Friend in Las Vegas, Nevada; coauthored LA Son, a bestselling memoir and cookbook; appeared on TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” list; and starred alongside filmmaker Jon Favreau on The Chef Show, a hit docuseries on the streaming platform Netflix.

Salsa verde—translated as “green sauce” in Spanish—is a tomatillo salsa that adds a tangy sweetness to tacos and other Mexican dishes, like chilaquiles and enchiladas. Mexican salsa verde also goes by “tomatillo salsa” or “green salsa” in the United States to distinguish it from the Italian parsley-caper sauce of the same name.

Tomatillos—seedy green fruits that resemble small green tomatoes covered in thin, papery husks—are the main ingredient in Mexican salsa verde. Though they’re known as “tomates verdes” in Mexico, tomatillos are not the same as green tomatoes and are close relatives of ground cherries.

While salsa verde differs from place to place, most green salsa recipes call for cilantro, jalapeño peppers (or other peppers), and garlic.

Before making your next batch of salsa verde, check out these tips:

1. 1. Buy the right ingredients. When shopping for ingredients, choose fresh tomatillos that are firm, bright green, and bulging from their husks. You can use tomatillos milperos—smaller and purple with a sweeter flavor—instead of green tomatillos for a slightly sweeter salsa.
2. 2. Peel and rinse your tomatillos. Rinsing the tomatillos will make it easier to peel the sticky fruits away from their papery husks. Rinse a second time after peeling to ensure no papery bits end up in your salsa.
3. 3. Char the tomatoes. Before dropping all the ingredients in a blender, char the tomatillos and aromatics on a griddle or in your oven’s broiler to soften them and introduce a complex smoky flavor.
4. 4. Add onions, but don’t blend them. If you prefer your salsa with the kick of white onion, roughly chop about a ¼ cup and rinse them with cold water. The water will lessen the overpowering flavor and aroma of the onions. Blending or processing raw onions in a food processor releases unpleasantly harsh, sulfuric flavors, so leave them intact and stir them in at the end instead.
5. 5. Add lime juice. Tomatillos have plenty of acidity on their own, but a splash of lime juice can brighten up a salsa verde that didn’t turn out as tangy as you like.
6. 6. Use the salsa in new applications. Salsa verde is an excellent accompaniment to tacos or scooped up with a bag of chips, but you can deploy it in unexpected ways, too: spoon it over rice bowls, toss it with grilled vegetables, or add it to a Bloody Mary cocktail.