the.com/tomatillo
A green tomato's more sour, more honest Mexican cousin — still wearing its own wrapper.
means A small, tart green (or purple) fruit encased in a papery husk, used raw or cooked as the base of salsa verde and other Mexican dishes.
from From Spanish tomatillo, literally 'little tomato' — tomate plus the diminutive suffix -illo. Tomate itself traces back to Nahuatl tomatl, the Aztec word for the plant, borrowed into Spanish and then the world. The tomatillo is actually a separate species (Physalis philadelphica) from the tomato, wrapped in its own papery husk, a relative of the ground cherry rather than a shrunken version of its red cousin — the name is a diminutive of kinship, not of botany.
- botanical family
- nightshade, related to tomatoes and physalis, not just lookalikes
- the husk
- papery calyx stays on until you peel it off
- salsa verde base
- turns olive-green and tangy when roasted or boiled
- ripeness test
- ready when it fills and splits its own husk