Chicken Verde Tacos Recipe

Taco night doesn't have to mean ground beef and a packet of spices from the grocery store. With this verde chicken tacos recipe, you will discover just how easy it is to make restaurant-quality chicken tacos at home. It starts with a sauce made from roasted garlic, onion, tomatillos, poblanos, and jalapeños combined with fresh cilantro, lime juice, and chicken broth. Once that is blended up into a beautiful salsa verde, it is used to simmer chicken thighs and thinly-sliced onion, resulting in a tangy, spicy, richly flavored filling for your tacos.

After that, taco night is in your hands. You can keep it simple, as we have in this recipe, and serve the verde chicken with just lightly charred corn tortillas, crumbled queso fresco, and finely chopped cilantro. But you can also serve this more in the style of a classic American taco night, with flour tortillas or crunchy shells, sour cream, shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes — the works. However you choose to finish your chicken tacos, once you see how simple it is to make such delicious chile verde chicken, taco night will never be the same.

For this recipe, you will need poblano peppers, one jalapeño pepper, tomatillos, white onion, garlic, lime juice, cilantro, chicken broth, and cilantro. Once you have those ingredients together, you are ready to start cooking. You may also want queso fresco cheese, corn tortillas, and additional cilantro for serving.

Preheat the oven to 450 F.

Place the tomatillos, peppers, garlic, and one-half of the onion on a baking sheet and bake for 36 minutes, removing the garlic and flipping the peppers halfway through.

Allow the peppers to cool enough to handle, then remove the skins and seeds.

Add the tomatillos, peppers, roasted onion half, garlic, cilantro, chicken broth, and lime juice to a food processor or blender.

Make the salsa verde by pureeing these ingredients. Add salt to taste, and set aside for now.

Bring a large pan to medium-high heat and add the oil followed by the chicken thighs and the remaining half of the onion, thinly sliced.

Sear the chicken on both sides, around 3 minutes each.

Add the salsa verde to the pan, reduce the heat to medium-low, and simmer for 10 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked through.

Remove the chicken and chop or shred it, then return it to the pan, remove the pan from the heat, and adjust the seasoning to taste.

Serve with lightly charred corn tortillas, crumbled queso fresco, and chopped cilantro, if desired.

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What you have in this recipe is a pretty simple, mild, and vegetable-heavy base. It will make delicious tacos, but it is also a great jumping-off point for you to explore your culinary creativity and see what you can come up with. For starters, you may want to add a little bit more heat to the recipe. Poblanos peppers are pretty mild, and we included just one jalapeño to give it a smidge of spice. But if you are the sort that likes a bit of tingle with your tacos, feel free to turn up the heat with some extra chiles. You can add another jalapeño or two without changing things too much, but also feel free to add different types of chiles, like serranos or habaneros — in small quantities — if you want things really spicy.

You may also wish to incorporate some spices in the recipe. A touch of cumin rarely goes awry in a Mexican dish, and would certainly add a bit of aromatic complexity here. Dried oregano is another item from the list of essential Mexican ingredients, so feel free to add a sprinkle of that as well.

You should also feel free to try this recipe with different proteins. Substituting chicken breasts for the thighs is a very simple swap, but it would work equally well to sub in pork. The best cut of pork for chile verde is probably pork shoulder, so you might want to stew things a bit longer and add some additional broth if you go that route. Or just use pork loin or chops in the same way you would the chicken thighs. If you're looking for a vegetarian option, you can rarely go wrong with beans.

One lovely thing about Mexican cooking is that your proteins can so easily be incorporated into a myriad of classic dishes. Here we have presented this chile verde chicken in tacos, mounded atop a charred corn tortilla with just queso fresco and cilantro to accompany it, but there is no reason that it could not be used in all sorts of other dishes.

If you want to keep things simple, try adding some of this verde chicken to a quesadilla. Just scoop a bit into a large flour tortilla with plenty of Oaxaca cheese – the best cheese for quesadillas – fold it in half, and griddle with butter until melty and delicious. You can, of course, also roll this chicken up in a burrito with rice and beans for a nice, hearty meal. Or deconstruct that, and serve a platter with homemade Mexican rice, refried beans, plenty of verde chicken, and some lettuce and pico de gallo — just like you'd get at a Mexican restaurant.

All of these are also great ways to use up any leftover verde chicken you might have as well. With eight servings in the recipe, you might just have a bit left after dinner, but with all of the options on the table, that's a good problem to have.

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