Tomatillo Sauce

September 21, 2007 at 8:36 pm (Mexican & S. American, My brain, Sauce/dressing, unrated)

Making tomatillo sauce sounds so simple, I invariably forgo following a recipe and decide to just wing it—which is inevitably a disaster.  I don’t know why but my improvised tomatillo sauces are typically inedible.  Here’s what I did this week:

I roasted at a high temperature in the oven until the peppers were slightly blackened:

• a little over a pound of fresh tomatillos, husks removed
• 2 small red onions, halved
• 4 garlic cloves, peeled
• 1 jalepeno, seeded
• 1 poblano, seeded and halved

Then I removed the pepper skins and threw everything into the blender.  The resulting sauce tasted truly horrible.  It sounds like it should be fine, right?  A friend on hearing this tale said it probably just needed cilantro and lime, but I’m skeptical.   I didn’t want to add it because I was certain it was going to be a waste of perfectly good cilantro and lime. It really tasted awful.  I compared this recipe to a recipe in Rick Bayless’s cookbook, which called for roasting tomatillos.  The major difference I saw was that he didn’t roast the onions (and maybe the garlic?), but instead put them in raw.  That makes sense, as you want the onion to give a little bit of bite.  Next time I improvise this sauce, I will not roast any onions.  Repeat, I will not roast onions.