Roasted garlic green tomato salsa is made using unripe tomatoes, roasted jalapenos and garlic for a different spin on your usual salsa fresca.

Roasted Garlic Green Tomato Salsa

By Sue Lau | Palatable  Pastime

This type of salsa is a salsa fresca, which you make with fresh tomatoes and chop them up. But it does have cooked items in it, first the chiles are roasted to bring out the flavor (it doesn’t really “cook” them) and the garlic is roasted to bring out a milder taste. So in this regard this is not like the usual “green” salsas you may come across (and which I make all the time) which use tomatillos (which are not tomatoes), or green chiles, or a combination thereof.

Looking for: Tomatillo Salsa?

I do have a recipe for green chile salsa verde which I will blog at some point, I promise.

This salsa fresca also uses ripened tomatoes, which in the photo you can see that I used a red tomato and also a yellow tomato. You can use whatever types of ripe tomatoes you like. There are so many wonderful heirloom varieties! And this being like the usual salsa fresca can be a bit more watery that cooked salsas, so if you want things a little more homogenized, you can puree a portion of it and mix it back in. If you do make this ahead, don’t use “quite” as much hot peppers as you think you will, because that will intensify upon standing, which is pretty specific to fresh salsas as cooked salsas bring out all the heat in the pepper when it cooks.

This makes about 1 quart. If you aren’t going to need that much I would recommend cutting the recipe back because this doesn’t freeze well, unlike cooked salsas. Also, this recipe is NOT formulated for water bath canning because it does not have enough acidity to be safe.

I often  roast my tomatoes and chiles on a comal.

A comal is a cast iron griddle which you can use to roast the peppers on until they blacken and char. You can do essentially the same thing with a cast iron skillet. Charring the peppers does produce a little bit of vapor and smoke, so do it in a well-ventilated area. You can also char them under the broiler in the oven, or out on the grill.

When removing the seeds and membranes from the peppers, you may choose to use plastic gloves. In any case, I recommend washing your hands several times afterwards with a good surfactant which cuts oil, such as Dawn. The irritant in the peppers is in the volatile oils.

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Roasted Garlic Green Tomato Salsa