What do you do when you suddenly have loads of little unripe green tomatoes on hand? (or big ones, for that matter!) Everyone thinks of making fried green tomatoes, but that just doesn’t work for the little ones! If you like green enchilada sauce, those green tomatoes are the perfect base for a tart, fresh-tasting, flavorful green sauce.
And if you haven’t tried green enchilada sauce, you should definitely give this recipe a try. It’s marvelous regardless of what you use for filling your enchiladas: chicken, pork, beef, cheese, seafood, veggies – you name it, this sauce has it covered. Quite literally. Because nobody wants a dry enchilada. Am I right?
Authentic Mexican green enchilada sauce calls for tomatillos, but green tomatoes have a similar taste and texture when cooked. So they are the perfect substitute. If you have tomatillos on hand, go ahead and use them instead. But for those of us who are swamped with green tomatoes AND you love Mexican food, this recipe is for you.
What type of peppers to use for green tomato enchilada sauce?
This pretty green sauce can range from mild to spicy. By choosing the type and amount of hot peppers that go into the sauce, you control the level of heat that you want. Mild Hatch green chiles will yield a tasty, but tame sauce. While hotter peppers such as jalapeño, carrot or habañero (or the extra hot green chiles) will add fire and zest to your sauce.
I grew three types of hot peppers in my garden this year: jalapeno, salsa peppers (that look/taste similar to the Hatch green chile), and carrot peppers (a small pepper that looks like a carrot but tastes like FIRE). The three peppers have a different way of hitting your palate. So I like to use them together to create spiciness that you taste immediately, and then a little fire that sneaks up behind. That’s what the carrot pepper does for me. It makes for an extended experience of the sauce that’s a little addictive for those that love heat.
For this sauce, I chose to use one salsa pepper and one carrot pepper. Use the peppers you prefer or what you have on hand. I do recommend making the sauce a bit hotter than you think you want. Remember: for enchiladas, we’re adding cheese, tortillas and filling. Each of those things tones down the heat. Especially the cheese.
The First Big Freeze
We had our first freeze of the year last week. It happened two nights in a row. On the first night, I didn’t even realize it was going to freeze because the forecast didn’t warn me. Luckily, it left my garden mostly intact. Some of the leaves on top curled and died. But most of the plants were still just fine. Then on the second night I covered my garden with blankets. I still have LOADS of good tomatoes trying. So I wanted to keep them growing, if I could!
The next morning I went out and uncovered the garden. I trimmed off all the top branches and the leaves aggressively. But all that cutting and moving jostled some tomatoes off the vine. Not to mention I accidentally cut a few branches that had unripe tomatoes on them. I picked up all the little green tomatoes. At first, I intended to nestle them in amongst riper tomatoes in a box so they could ripen. But then I got to thinking about how much my son loves the GREEN sauce whenever we order Mexican. Lately, we’ve only had red enchilada sauce on our homemade enchiladas.
I wondered: could I recreate the sauce he loves from the restaurant at home? He tasted it and told me it was good. But honestly, we haven’t had a chance to make his favorite chicken & bean enchiladas yet. That’s the next step: making the chicken. Once we have the chicken ready, we can make enchiladas to order. Which I did today. I made enchiladas for myself, stuffed with broccoli, lentils and cheese. (Yes, we make enchiladas to order here at my house.)
What to make with enchilada sauce?
The obvious answer is, of course, enchiladas! Here are a few ideas for you. Some of these might call for a red sauce, but feel free to try them with this yummy green sauce:
- Turkey Butternut Black Bean enchiladas
- Overnight Breakfast enchiladas
- Shredded Chicken enchiladas
- Seafood enchiladas
- Vegetarian enchiladas stuffed with:
But you can use this green enchilada sauce for other things too:
- Try enchilada stuffed zucchini boats – a.k.a. zucchini-ladas. A low-carb version of enchiladas that’s really really good.
- Use it to make enchilada soup – it might sound counterintuitive to use a sauce in a soup, but it makes soup-making so much easier!
- Have it for breakfast – Chilaquiles or huevos rancheros totally rock when you use this sauce!
- Make Mexican Lasagna – whether you use lasagna noodles, flour tortillas or corn tortillas for the “noodles”, this enchilada sauce is the perfect south-of-the-border sauce to zest things up
- Whip up some Southwestern Ranch Casserole which mixes enchilada sauce with ranch dressing and tosses with noodles, mushrooms, chicken, tomatoes and cheese. Serious yum.
- Ditch the canned red sauce in Chicken Tamale Pie for this lovely green sauce!
- Sauce up your burritos
- Add some extra flavor to your mac & cheese
How to can Green Tomato Enchilada Sauce
So let’s talk about how to preserve this precious sauce when you’re, say, tripling the recipe because you are inundated with green tomatoes. Like when you ask your mom if she has any green tomatoes left and she says they had a hard freeze so she’s not sure if they have any. But then calls back a couple days later and says she has 30. (This may have happened to me …)
Due to the broth used, I don’t believe this recipe is suitable for water-bath canning, but I did find a similar recipe that uses water in place of the broth. I really like the flavor that the broth adds, so I’m not sure I’d go that route, but it is an option. Note that she adds extra lime juice to each jar when water bath canning the sauce.
I pressure canned my sauce in pint jars for 50 minutes. After the first batch, I decided to can a more concentrated version with less broth and then add broth when I open the jar. There’s a handy guide in this post for pressure canning green enchilada sauce.
The other option for preserving this sauce is to freeze it. Because of the high water content, make sure you leave room for expansion when it freezes!
Print
Green Tomato Enchilada Sauce
- Yield: About 1 quart (4 cups) 1x
Ingredients
- 1 Tablespoon olive oil
- 1 medium onion, peeled and cut into chunks
- 4 cloves garlic, peeled
- 1 teaspoon cumin
- 1 – 2 hot peppers (I used 1 green salsa pepper, 1 carrot pepper)
- 1 lb. unripe green tomatoes
- 1 1/2 cups chicken or vegetable broth
- 2 – 3 Tablespoons cilantro almond pesto or a handful of cilantro
- 1 – 2 teaspoons chicken or vegetable Better than Bouillon or salt, to taste
- Juice of 1 – 2 limes (to taste)
Instructions
- Swirl the olive oil around in a medium saucepan and heat over medium heat. Put the onion and garlic into your food processor and pulse a few times to roughly chop. (Or chop manually.) Put them into the saucepan and saute until the onion is soft and translucent. Sprinkle with cumin and stir until fragrant.
- Toss the hot peppers into your food processor now. Core the larger green tomatoes and cut into big chunks and put them in the food processor too. Pulse until things are chopped into small chunks. (Or chop by hand.) Add the tomatoes and peppers to the pan, then the broth. Stir well, then cover and let cook for about 15 minutes or until the tomatoes are soft and tender, stirring occasionally.
- Remove from heat. Stir in the cilantro pesto (or cilantro) and lime juice. Taste and add bouillon or salt if needed. Either put the sauce back in the processor or use an immersion blender to blend until smooth.
Notes
RECIPE SOURCE: Sumptuous Spoonfuls – https://www.sumptuousspoonfuls.com/ … © Copyright 2022, Sumptuous Spoonfuls. All images & content are copyright protected. Please do not use my images without prior permission. If you want to publish any of my images, please ask first. If you want to republish this recipe as your own, please re-write the recipe in your own words or link back to this post for the recipe.
