Photo: Claire Lower
I moved into my house in winter when the garden was freshly sown and a few shrubby ornamental plants lined the perimeter of my garden. Owning a house in winter is different from owning a house in spring – things grow in spring, and a lot has grown around my house. As the weather warmed up, I was delighted to find an established asparagus patch, several flowers that I hadn’t planted, and so many tomatillo plants.
These things are everywhere. The previous owners – who lived next door until recently – had obviously planted many of the plants, and their seeds had spread to the front, back, and sides of the house. I’m not complaining, of course, as it takes a fair amount of tomatillos to make a decent amount of salsa.
If you think you’ve never had a tomatillo before, yes, you (probably) actually have. It’s the main ingredient in salsa verde, an ubiquitous salsa that dates back to the Aztecs. If you’ve never eaten a whole, fresh tomatillo before, it’s worth trying it on your own. It’s sweet and a little bit tart and denser and a little less juicy than a tomato. Fry them down and they’ll turn out sweet and deep.
Before I added the garlic.Photo: Claire Lower
I recently decided to see how sweet and deep they could get, so I tossed about 10 ounces of whole tomatillos into my air fryer basket, along with some peppers I picked from my garden and four cloves of garlic. I roasted everything with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and two generous pinches of salt 45 minutes in a 300 ℉ hot air fryer, stir occasionally until the Tomatillos et al. became a juicy, caramelized plant mass. I mixed everything together and then refined it with lime and a single raw Thai chilli to heat it up (obviously not traditional, but it was what I had in my garden and it was pretty spicy).
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Photo: Claire Lower
It was good, but very sweet, almost too sweet; It showed how efficient roasting can be as a method of adding sweetness without adding extra table sugar (or agave or anything else). Roasting triggers both caramelization and the Maillard reaction, but it also drives off water and intensifies the sweetness. It works so well that you need to be a little careful while using its power.
For example, I roasted a little too hard and my salsa was a little too sweet. If I did it all over again, I’d toast about half the ingredients and leave some tomatillos and peppers raw to offset the deeper, stickier flavors with a bit of oomph and oomph.
But if you have a salsa recipe, for example, that you want to make a little deeper, darker, and sweeter, just toast some of the ingredients and toast them well until they lose their juice, lose their shape, and develop some color. (You can use a hot air fryer like I did, or you can use a Normie oven. Both are great options.) Mix the toasted stuff with the remaining ingredients into your salsa to sweeten the batch, all with no additive of sugar or sweeteners.
