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What even are tomatillos?
Are they just little green tomatoes?
And are they only good for making salsa verde?
“Only good for salsa verde?”
That's like looking at money and being like, “What is this good for?
Is it only good for exchanging for goods and services?”
Salsa verde is life.
And no, tomatillos are not just little green tomatoes, even though tomatillo literally
means little tomato, at least etymologically speaking in Spanish.
Tomatillos are from the same family as tomatoes — Solanaceae, or nightshades — but that
also includes potatoes and eggplant and chilies.
Tomatillo is a berry like the tomato, and it was originally domesticated in Mexico,
like the tomato.
But what the tomatillo is really closely related to is ground cherries, or sometimes they're
called goldenberries or Cape gooseberries.
I was cutting back these annuals in my flower beds the other day when I found one solitary
ground cherry plant that I didn't realize I had, or it might be some other kind of closely
related plant.
What really distinguishes this whole genius of nightshades is that papery husk enclosing
the fruit.
It's also called a lantern, which I think is a very pretty name — much prettier than
the botanical Latin name, which is Physalis.
That comes from the ancient Greek word for bladder.
Or wind instrument.
A membrane that puffs up.
The lantern actually puffs up a little ahead of the fruit inside.
If you harvest too soon, the fruit will just be dangling inside these giant parachute pant
legs hanging around it.
Here's some tomatillos growing in my friend Nathan's garden — the beer-brewing o-chem
professor of Maryville College.
The lantern provides an obvious evolutionary advantage for tomatillos and other members
of the Physalis genus.
It protects the growing fruit until it is mature.
When the fruit is full grown, it bursts out of the husk like it was John Hurt's chest.
What exactly is that husk?
The lantern is the calyx of the flower that birthed this berry.
If we look at other nightshades like an eggplant here.
That green thing — that's the calyx.
We look at pepper — that sort of green little leafy thing at the top — that's the calyx.
Tomato — believe it or not, these things that look like leaves at the top, that's the
calyx of the tomato.
All botanically complete flowers have a calyx.
Calyx is the collective name for these green leaf light parts called sepals that grow behind
the flower petals to protect the budding flower.
As a lot of flowers bloom, the calyx becomes kind of vestigial and it might dry up and
fall away.
But in some flowers, the calyx sticks around and it kind of becomes this tube that encloses
the fruit as the fruit grows out of the flower.
You see this in the pomegranate.
The leathery skin on the pomegranate, that actually is the calyx that has in fact merged
onto the fruit and grown to be part of it.
You can actually see the tips of the "leaves" here at the end, the sepals.
Pears and apples are another interesting case.
They still have the calyx on them, but unlike the pomegranate we actually eat the calyx
on a pear or an apple.
That's the outer layer of what we call the fruit.
That's all the lantern is on a tomatillo — the calyx, the protective leaf-like parts that
grow at the base of innumerable flowers.
Unlike the eggplant, the tomatillo calyx wraps around the whole fruit, like it does on a
pomegranate.
But unlike the pomegranate, the calyx on a tomatillo is not attached to the fruit and
is therefore easy to peel off.
Reasonably easy.
It tends to adhere to this sticky goo on the surface of the fruit.
That sticky layer is an insect repellent that is created by the fruit.
It contains these phytochemicals called withanolides that insects apparently really do not like.
People say that they are bitter, or that something in this sticky substance is bitter.
I don't really taste it.
I don't taste anything at all, come to think of it.
And from what I've read, it's not harmful at all to humans, but people say it's bitter
and that you need to wash it off.
Perhaps the grossness that people taste there is dirt that tends to stick to that insect-repelling
layer.
Very ripe tomatillos burst out of their lanterns, and thus exposed, they collect dirt like flypaper
because they're sticky.
So that's a good reason to wash them off before you use them.
Speaking of ripeness, the really ripe ones tend to be more yellow than green.
In some varieties they're even purple.
The ripe ones are juicier on the inside and softer.
This one is bordering on mushy and they have a nice mixture of acidity and sweetness.
OMG, I'm dying, I'm dying.
Nah, I'm kidding.
People commonly believe that raw tomatillos are toxic.
In fact, one time I was doing an interview for a video and the guy I was talking to had
watched an earlier vid of mine where I cooked tomatillos, and he scolded me for not warning
you of the threat of imminent and certain death should you consume a raw tomatillo.
And I felt really bad about it.
Then I went home and I looked at the available scientific literature on the topic, and nah,
it's not really true.
All nightshades do contain some toxic alkaloids, like tomatine and solanine, and they may be
present in harmful amounts in the leaves and the stems and such.
But remember, the fruit wants to be eaten when ripe so that we animals will disperse
its seeds and help the plant spread its genetic material far and wide.
It would be reproductively disadvantageous for the plant to kill the animals that eat
its mature fruit.
This is, of course, not to say that all fruits are safe for humans to eat.
They're not.
But here's a paper out of Poland, where surprisingly they grow a lot of tomatillos.
"It is concluded that toxic compounds which would be harmful to human health were not
found in tomatillo fruits."
Here's a book chapter from American and Japanese scientists that also found the fruit to be
perfectly safe and indeed potentially quite beneficial to human health.
Certainly the really immature fruits have more of the toxic alkaloids.
The fruit does not want to be eaten until it is ready for reproduction, right?
But the thing is is if you got one that was really underripe and it had a lot of those
alkaloids in it, it would taste really bitter and you wouldn't want to eat it.
You'd be like, Yuck, I don't want this.
And so you wouldn't poison yourself with it.
That's why we are evolved to be repulsed by alkaloids and to perceive them as bitter.
Take, for example, solanine poisoning from green potatoes.
It's a pretty rare thing to have happen because most people who eat a green potato say, Yuck,
this is gross, and they stop eating it.
Most of the documented cases are in young children or soldiers who just kind of ate
whatever they were given.
And it's believed that poisoning of that kind was also a much more common in times of famine,
when people ate bitter produce out of desperation.
So yeah, I don't worry about it that much.
And indeed, I think I prefer the slightly less ripe specimens that you see at the store
— the ones that are still more green than they are yellow and still pretty firm.
Though, any tomatillo is going to be way firmer than a tomato.
The inside is far more fibrous, which is why I doubt you would want to eat them raw anyway.
When they're slightly less ripe, they're more acidic and more vegetal.
I like that.
It's kind of weak on its own, but phenomenal as a stew or sauce base.
In Mexico, they'll generally roast tomatillos — maybe with some chilies and onions.
I toss them with oil and then throw them under the boiler.
Do they call it a grill or a boiler in Mexico?
Get some beautiful color on those and already that tastes much nicer.
Then you could go the traditional route and bash that up in a molcajete with some cilantro
and lime juice, maybe some raw garlic.
And I'm very bad at doing that without making mess, but the results are undeniable.
Another way that they'll do it in Mexico is to boil the tomatillos just until they're
starting to go soft.
You can see the skin starting to peel off there.
That's a good sign.
This time I'm going to be lazy and use my food processor.
Blitz that with some raw garlic, a little lime juice, cilantro, pinch of salt.
Blitz.
Extremely nice, with a brighter and fresher flavor than the roasted salsa.
Although I have seen some Mexican cooks split the different and fry their salsa verde in
hot oil to get some brown flavors into it.
I like that as well.
Either way, try letting it sit and cool for a while before you eat it.
Tomatillos are very high in pectin, which thickens cooked fruit after you cool it down
a bit.
I use salsa verde to make my green enchiladas, which are one of the recipes I've done here
on my channel that I actually do make at home for myself very frequently.
Actually my wife makes me make it.
It's dynamite, and it's linked in the description.
And I thank all of the awesome Mexican grandmas on YouTube who have helped me learn how to
cook such things.
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And thank you to ancient Central and Southern Americans who domesticated many of my favorite
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This alone is worth your efforts.
"Only good for salsa verde."
Pshaw.