Creamy Cilantro Sauce

It takes just 5 minutes to make this creamy cilantro sauce. Staying true to it’s name, this green sauce has big flavors of cilantro.

Yes, we are loading this sauce with cilantro rather than loaded it with cream cheese or sour cream. This cilantro sauce recipe will give you big fresh flavors of the wonderful herb – cilantro.

Creaminess in this magical sauce is from a ‘somewhat’ healthy ingredient – Greek Yogurt.  It’s used in portions just enough to make the sauce perfectly creamy, without over powering and suppressing cilantro flavors.  

Some of the popular restaurants and bar has the best cilantro sauce, but I personally think it lacks the fresh cilantro flavors. Sauce has so much creaminess from cream cheese/sour cream used in it.

I wanted to create a well-balanced cilantro cream sauce, which brings out the cilantro flavors as well, and not dominating it.

This cilantro cream sauce recipe has loads of cilantro along with garlic, jalapenos, lime juice, vinegar, cumin powder, pepper-salt to taste along with Greek yogurt and olive oil.

The portions of ingredients used in this recipe is as per my taste preference. Please feel free to adjust it according to your taste.

Summer brings fresh produce of herbs in bountiful. Loads of cilantro growing in your garden? Use it all up to make this creamy cilantro sauce.

That one sauce that screams summer all the ways is this cilantro lime sauce. It’s uses the best of wonderful summer ingredients. This magical green sauce can be used on – EVERYTHING! Literally everything.

Use this creamy wonderful sauce as –

• salad dressing,
• to drizzle over tacos, quesadillas,
• burritos, nachos,
• spreads for burgers, sandwich,
• drizzle it over grilled meat or fish,
• stir it with roasted potato or roast chicken, 
• use it as dipping sauce with your fries, vegetables.

and I could go on and on with the list.

Cilantro Lime Sauce Ingredients

This summer sauce needs handful of mostly fresh summer produce to make a kick-ass green sauce, that’s both creamy, fresh with herbs flavors.

This sauce will change the way you look at salad dressing. It’s packed with fresh summer flavors and your salad would never be the same with this sauce.

You’ll need –

Fresh cilantro: The main ingredients of this sauce. Use cilantro with stem. Cilantro stem bags loads of nutrients and flavors. Don’t remove the stem away.

If your garden is filled with cilantro, the best way to use it is to make fresh sauce.

Garlic: Flavors and taste of garlic along with cilantro is wonderful. Do not use too much garlic. Too much raw garlic flavor will offset the taste of the sauce. For 2 packed cups of cilantro use a about 2 to 4 cloves of garlic.

Jalapeno : Adds a mild heat to the sauce. Remove seeds of jalapenos if you like milk heat(we like the heat, so seeds on it is for us). The recipe uses 2 jalapenos. Adjust the number of jalapenos in the recipe to your taste. If you like more heat, add about 4 jalapenos.

Lime Juice: It adds a bit of a tang to balance other flavors in cilantro lime sauce recipe.

Greek Yogurt: Adds  perfect creaminess in cilantro cream sauce. An healthy alternative to other cream ingredients like sour cream or cream cheese.

Salt And Pepper: Season, always season your sauce well. There is nothing worse than under-seasoned food.  Adjust salt and pepper seasoning as per taste.

Cumin Powder: Enhances the flavors in the sauce. This is optional ingredient. But we highly recommend you don’t skip it.

Olive Oil: The oil emulsifies the sauce and gives wonderful texture and consistency. Use extra virgin olive oil for best taste.

White Vinegar: You actually don’t need vinegar if using lime juice. But we added vinegar along with lime juice. You can totally skip this. Use one of them – either lime juice or vinegar. For 2 packed cups of cilantro, use either ¼ cup lime juice (or) 2 tablespoon white vinegar.

How To Make Cilantro Sauce

All you need to make this magical sauce is a blender or a food processor.

Pick cilantro, keeping those stem on. Cilantro stem bags loads of flavors and it has so much nutrients in it. You don’t want to be throwing all those nutrients away.

Rinse cilantro with stem in water to get rid of any dirt (if plucking fresh from garden).

Add cilantro, garlic cloves, jalapenos, salt, ground pepper, cumin powder, lime juice and Greek yogurt into the blender. (You can add all ingredients at a time too).

Note: Some food processor doesn’t work if there is liquid at the bottom of the processor jar. Did you know that!? Apparently I didn’t know and I struggled with my newly bought processor trying to figure out why it wouldn’t operate. For those reasons I prefer to add liquids while the processor is running. And also it helps emulsify the sauce into beautiful texture.

Pro-Tip : You could first blend garlic so it gets minced well and then blend other ingredients. That way you don’t get chunks of garlic left over in the sauce. Depending on your food processor, you can include or ignore this step.

If using blender, you don’t have to bother about this step.

Blend until smooth.

Then pour in vinegar (optional) and olive oil in slow streams. Continue to blend until it reaches smooth and creamy sauce.

Taste and adjust the season (salt and pepper) to taste.

Transfer cilantro lime sauce into air tight glass jar. You can store it in fridge for up to a week.

Use it on salads, burgers, sandwiches, roasted chicken, grilled meat, for fries for dipping – literally everything.

Substitutions of Cilantro Sauce

A note : this recipe is amazing as it is and you really don’t need to change anything here. But we all love to have the freedom to change things up.

And this sauce recipe gives you that freedom. You have total control on what you want to put in your sauce. 

We all love to substitute and change the recipe to suit to our taste.

Below are some of the substitution ideas –

Cilantro – I always get comments from some users saying that don’t like cilantro taste and flavors. It’s very medicinal. I LOVE cilantro and it doesn’t taste medicinal to me. The cilantro variety we get in India are so flavorful and delicious.  I would never put anything else but cilantro in this recipe.

But if you absolutely hate cilantro, then you can replace cilantro with parsley or even fresh basil. I don’t know for sure if you could still call it cilantro sauce then. Haha.

Greek Yogurt – Like we mentioned about this sauce recipe is slightly on the healthier side. We avoid using sour cream or cream cheese for those reasons.

Healthy substitution for Greek yogurt – avocados.  Avocado cilantro sauce will be wonderful creamy and thick.

Other substitutions for Greek yogurt – Cream cheese or sour cream and milk together.

Jalapenos – Jalapenos is used in cilantro garlic sauce for heat. You can use red chili flakes in place of jalapenos.

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Creamy Cilantro Sauce

It takes just 5 minutes to make this creamy cilantro sauce. Staying true to it’s name, this green sauce has big flavors of cilantro.

5 from 9 votes

Print Pin Rate

Course: sauce

Cuisine: Tex-Mex

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Cook Time: 0 minutes

Servings: 6 people

Calories: 125kcal

Author: Jyothi Rajesh

Equipment

• food processor or blender

Ingredients

• 1 huge bunch fresh cilantro with stem (2 cups fully packed)
• 4 cloves garlic
• 2 jalapenos
• 1/4 cup lime juice
• 1/2 cup Greek yogurt
• 1 teaspoon cumin powder (optional)
• Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
• 1 tablespoon vinegar (optional)
• 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

US Customary – Metric

Instructions

• Pick cilantro, keeping those stem on. Cilantro stem bags loads of flavors and it has so much nutrients in it. You don’t want to be throwing all those nutrients away.
• Rinse cilantro with stem in water to get rid of any dirt (if plucking fresh from garden).
• Add cilantro, garlic cloves, jalapenos, salt, ground pepper, cumin powder, lime juice and Greek yogurt into the blender. (You can add all ingredients at a time too).
• Note: Some food processor doesn’t work if there is liquid at the bottom of the processor jar. Did you know that!? Apparently I didn’t know and I struggled with my newly bought processor trying to figure out why it wouldn’t operate. For those reasons I prefer to add liquids while the processor is running. And also it helps emulsify the sauce into beautiful texture.
• Pro-Tip : You could first blend garlic so it gets minced well and then blend other ingredients. That way you don’t get chunks of garlic left over in the sauce. Depending on your food processor, you can include or ignore this step.
  If using blender, you don’t have to bother about this step.
• Blend until smooth.
• Pour in vinegar (optional) and olive oil in slow streams. Continue to blend
  until it reaches smooth and creamy sauce.
• Taste and adjust the season (salt and pepper) to taste.
• Transfer cilantro lime sauce into air tight glass jar. You can store it in fridge for up to a week.
• Use it on salads, burgers, sandwiches, roasted chicken, grilled meat, for fries for dipping – literally everything.

Video

Notes

1. Use cilantro leaves with stem. Stem has max flavors.
2. You will not need water since olive oil is used to blend the sauce. Add few tablespoons water if needed in case blender gets stuck.
3. White vinegar can be replace with red wine vinegar. A mix of vinegar and lime juice adds beautiful tang to the sauce. Use either vinegar or lime juice if you want to cut down the tang.
4. For diary free cilantro cream sauce use avocado in place of diary. Avocado’s gives the sauce creaminess and thickness.
5. In place of Greek yogurt, use sour cream or cream cheese. 
6. If you are allergic to cilantro or don’t like it’s taste, replace cilantro with parsley or fresh basil.
7. Adjust jalapenos as per your taste. Use more for added heat. 
8. Replace jalapenos with red chili flakes. 

 

Nutritional Info – Please keep in mind that nutritional information provided is only a rough estimate and can vary greatly based on products used.

Nutrition

Calories: 125kcal | Carbohydrates: 3g | Protein: 2g | Fat: 12g | Saturated Fat: 2g | Cholesterol: 1mg | Sodium: 8mg | Potassium: 61mg | Fiber: 1g | Sugar: 1g | Vitamin A: 60IU | Vitamin C: 9.2mg | Calcium: 25mg | Iron: 0.3mg

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