Green Tomato Enchilada Sauce

Green tomato enchilada sauce turns a bucket of end-of-season tomatoes into a smooth, tangy green sauce. It’s ready for enchiladas, burritos, and braised pork, and it tastes nothing like the flat, tinny stuff from a can.

Green tomatoes are just part of the gardening reality here in the North Country, with short seasons and cool nights, we always have plenty that don’t ripen in time. Every year, I try new green tomato canning recipes to stock my pantry, and I’m always surprised by how well they turn out.

Green tomatoes are some of the most popular vegetables in old-time canning books, and many from the early 1900s have dozens of recipes for preserving them (and often just 1-2 recipes for cucumber pickles, so that tells you something about their popularity).

Most of the old-time recipes are relishes, such as popular green tomato chow chow and picalilli recipes, but they also include quite a few fun ones like green tomato jam and green tomato marmalade.

Modern canning guides repeat many of those older recipes, so they’ve stood the test of time. They also add new guidance that lets you do even more with green tomatoes. The NCHFP says you can swap green tomatoes in for tomatillos in any tomatillo canning recipe. They have a similar consistency and flavor, but more importantly, a similar acidity, so the recipes are still safe for canning.

I developed this green tomato enchilada sauce recipe by modifying the tomatillo salsa recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

This is a pourable sauce and not a dip. If you want something thick and chunky to scoop with chips, my green tomato salsa verde is a different recipe with a completely different flavor.

I have a whole pile of green tomato canning recipes if you’re staring down a full bucket, and if you’re looking for recipes for fresh eating, I also have a long list of green tomato recipes that are meals, baked goods, and more.

Choosing Green Tomatoes for Enchilada Sauce

Use tomatoes that are firm and fully green, with no blush of pink or orange. Variety doesn’t matter, and neither does size, since everything gets diced. What you want is fruit that’s still hard.

A green tomato that’s started to turn is softer, sweeter, and less acidic than one picked dead green. Green tomatoes are slightly more acidic than ripe ones, which is part of why they do so well in waterbath canning recipes. Pass over anything frosted or soft.

If you’re picking the whole plant ahead of a hard frost, sort as you go. Set the large ones aside for canning green tomatoes whole or for frying.

Don’t peel them. Green tomatoes are close to impossible to peel, the same as tomatillos, and nobody peels either one for canning.

Unripe skins also behave differently in the jar than ripe tomato skins do, and they won’t turn bitter on you. The blender takes them down smooth anyway.

Ingredients for Green Tomato Enchilada Sauce

There are quite a few ingredients in this recipe, but each is important to building a complex, full-flavored sauce.

• Green tomatoes: The body of the sauce, and the reason it’s green. Firm, fully unripe fruit gives the best flavor and the thickest sauce.
• Onion: Sweetness and depth under the tang. Any onion works, and I use yellow because that’s what’s in the bin.
• Green chile peppers: The heat, and a good bit of the flavor. Anaheim and poblano make a mild sauce, jalapeño a medium one, and serrano will actually bring heat.
• Garlic: Savory backbone. Chop the cloves fine, and the blender takes care of the rest.
• White vinegar: Part of the acid that makes this safe in a water bath canner. It has to be labeled 5 percent acidity, and cider vinegar at 5 percent works too.
• Bottled lime juice: The rest of the acid, and the flavor that makes it taste like a green sauce. Use bottled lime juice rather than fresh, because bottled has a standardized acidity and fresh limes vary.
• Cumin and Mexican oregano: What turns this from a salsa into an enchilada sauce. Mexican oregano is more citrusy than the Mediterranean kind, and regular dried oregano is fine.
• Cilantro: Optional, and it’s in the original recipe. I leave it out of an enchilada sauce, but add it if you want it to taste more like a salsa.
• Canning salt: Flavor only. Use canning or pickling salt rather than table salt, which has anti-caking agents that can cloud the jars.
• Hot pepper flakes: A little background heat behind the fresh peppers. Leave them out for a mild batch.

Ball’s note on this recipe is that the flavor mellows on the shelf. It’s at its best three to four weeks after canning. That’s held true in my pantry, so leave the first jar alone for a month if you can stand it.

How to Make Green Tomato Enchilada Sauce

There are only two real stages here. You dice and measure everything, then it all goes in a pot and cooks down until it falls apart.

Start your water bath canner heating before you begin dicing. The sauce only cooks for twenty minutes, and you want the canner ready when it is.

Dicing and Measuring

Core the green tomatoes, cut out any bad spots, and dice them. The pieces don’t need to be pretty, since the whole thing gets blended. Keep them small enough to cook through evenly.

Measure the diced tomatoes into your pot rather than weighing the whole ones. The measured cups are what the recipe is built on.

Dice the onions and peppers and measure those too. Wear gloves if you’re working with hot peppers. Chop the garlic fine.

A food processor that dices rather than purees cuts this step down to almost nothing, and it’s what I use for most of my chopped recipes. If yours only has a standard blade, pulse rather than run it. Otherwise you’ll have slush before you’ve measured anything.

Cooking and Blending

Put the tomatoes, onions, peppers, and garlic in a large stainless pot. Add the vinegar, lime juice, cumin, oregano, salt, and pepper flakes.

Bring it to a boil over medium high heat, stirring constantly so nothing catches on the bottom. Green tomatoes have more pectin than tomatillos, and the mixture thickens as it goes. It will scorch if you walk away from it.

Once it’s boiling, turn it down to a gentle simmer and cover the pot. Let it cook about twenty minutes, stirring now and then, until the tomatoes have completely fallen apart. You’re not looking for tender here, you’re looking for collapsed.

Then blend it smooth, and don’t skip this part. Tomatillos break down into a sauce on their own, and green tomatoes never quite do. Without the blender you end up with a chunky salsa rather than a sauce you can pour.

An immersion blender right in the pot is easiest, and it saves moving boiling sauce to a countertop blender. Blend until no lumps are left, then bring the sauce back to a boil before you fill jars.

Canning Green Tomato Enchilada Sauce

Have your canner at a simmer and your jars hot before the sauce is ready. If this is your first time running one, my guide to water bath canning for beginners walks through the whole process. A steam canner works for this recipe too.

Ladle the hot sauce into hot jars through a canning funnel, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Run a bubble tool around the inside of each jar to release trapped air. Check the headspace again and top up with more sauce if it dropped.

Wipe the rims with a damp cloth, center the lids, and screw the bands to fingertip tight. Lower the jars into the canner with a jar lifter. The water needs to cover them by at least an inch.

Bring it back to a full rolling boil. Then process half pints and pints for 15 minutes, adjusting for altitude using the chart below.

When the time is up, turn off the heat and take the canner lid off. Wait five minutes, then lift the jars onto a towel on the counter. Leave them alone for 12 to 24 hours.

Check the seals by pressing the center of each lid. Take the bands off before the jars go on the shelf.

Ways to Use Green Tomato Enchilada Sauce

The obvious one is enchiladas. Warm a jar in a pan and dip the tortillas through it. Roll them around shredded chicken or beans, pour the rest over the top, and bake.

It’s the fastest weeknight dinner in my pantry, because the sauce is the part that normally takes an hour. Beyond that, it’s a braising liquid. Pour a jar over a pork shoulder in the slow cooker, and you have green chile pork by supper.

It does the same for chicken thighs, and it makes a good base for a pot of white beans. I also use it straight from the jar on eggs and rice bowls, and as the sauce in a pan of huevos rancheros.

Storage and Shelf Life

Sealed jars keep best within 12 to 18 months in a cool, dark cupboard. The flavor is at its peak after the first month on the shelf.

Take the bands off before you store them. A band can hold a failed seal in place and hide it from you. Check each lid with a press of your finger before the jars go away, and again when you pull one out.

Any jar that didn’t seal goes straight into the refrigerator and gets used within a week. You can also reprocess an unsealed jar with a new lid within 24 hours. At that point, I’d rather just eat it.

Once a sealed jar is opened, keep it in the refrigerator. Use it within a week to ten days.

Here are the questions I get most often about canning green sauces.

Green Tomato Enchilada Sauce FAQs

Readers ask about the acid and the peppers more than anything else, so those two are first.

More Green Tomato Canning Recipes

There’s a lot more you can do with a bucket of unripe tomatoes.

Southern Chow Chow (Traditional Green Tomato Relish)

Old-Fashioned Green Tomato Jam

Pickled Green Tomatoes (Old Fashioned Canning Recipe)

More Salsa Canning Recipes

Green sauce is only the start of what you can put up for taco night.

Corn Salsa Recipe for Canning

Peach Salsa

Mango Salsa