These chicken enchiladas are made with a tangy tomatillo salsa verde sauce! This is a fantastic recipe to serve a hungry crowd, whether it's Friday movie night, a pot-luck party, or just a weeknight dinner with your family.

Photography Credit: Elise Bauer

Raise your hand if you love enchiladas!

Enchiladas have been a staple in our family for as long as I can remember. They happily feed a crowd. You can prep them ahead and just bake them right before they’re needed. They also make terrific leftovers (especially with eggs for breakfast).

These salsa verde chicken enchiladas are one of my personal favorites! They’re filled with shredded chicken and smothered in a bright, tangy tomatillo salsa.

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What are Tomatillos?

Do you ever cook with tomatillos? They look like little lanterns, with their green papery husks.

Sometimes people mistake them for green tomatoes (doesn’t help that their Spanish name is “tomate verde”); they are nightshades, like eggplants and peppers, and therefore distant cousins of tomatoes, but the taste is quite different.

Making Authentic Enchilada Salsa Verde (Green Sauce)

The tomatillos I grow in my garden here in Northern California ripen in September and October, but most of the tomatillos we get from the market come all year round from Mexico. When my tomatillos are ripe, I make a large batch of Mexican salsa verde, perfect for tortilla chips, great with eggs, and awesome in these enchiladas.

For these chicken enchiladas, we are boiling the tomatillos to make the sauce, but you could easily roast or pan fry them. (Here’s a recipe for that method.)

How to Make Enchiladas Verde

To make these enchiladas, we start by poaching and shredding chicken thighs for the filling; the deeper flavor of the dark meat holds up much better to the chile and tomatillo sauce than chicken breasts.

We make the salsa verde by cooking tomatillos and puréeing them with chiles, onion, garlic, cilantro, and lime juice. You could also use already prepared bottled salsa verde.

Next we fry yellow corn tortillas to soften them and to bring out their flavor.

Then it’s just rolling up the tortillas with some salsa tossed shredded chicken inside and lining up the rolled tortillas in a casserole dish. Cover with salsa verde and bake! That’s it. Scatter with plenty of toppings—cotija cheese, red onion, cilantro, and sour cream to serve.

More Enchilada Recipes to Try!