You can talk about the chile heat scale, chile history, chile cultivation, chile spelling, and chile cuisine, but for the average chile eater, it’s been a matter of whether the salsa jar says mild, medium, hot, or extra hot. That’s about to change, as real chile comes into our markets and our kitchens.
Growing up on the East Coast where the chile pepper is just beginning a popularity spurt, I never gave it a thought until 25 years ago, on a tiny island in the Bahamas, when a local steered his wheelbarrow along the water’s edge with conch from the sea, calling out, “Come for your fresh conch salad.” Along with Bahamians, I followed him, curious, in the days when Americans were loath to eat a huge live mollusk being wrenched from its shell, rubbed with native lime, “scorched” and diced and combined with local tomatoes.
“You like it hot, mon?” I had no idea if I liked it hot, but I nodded, and he rubbed the conch meat just once, using a light hand, with the tiny “goat pepper,” which turns out officially to be Scotch bonnet, smoky and fruity, and very hot on the Scoville Heat Scale. I loved it, and came daily for my conch salad rubbed with goat pepper. Sometimes, I ate it for lunch and for dinner. Once home, I dreamed about it until the next year, and have eaten it in double portions for a week in the Bahamas for two decades.
Evolutionary gastronomy tells us that our tolerance for chile is determined by our ancestors and their genes, but with so many Americans separated from their geographic origins, we’ll just have to experiment. The same goes for the production of endorphins and for the aphrodisiac and addictive properties of chile peppers.
What we do know for sure is that fresh chile can reduce food spoilage, provide us “coolness” in hot places by making us sweat, reduce the activity of parasites in the gut, drain the sinuses, help to control insulin levels, provide an excellent source of Vitamins C and A, act as flavor in low-sodium diets, and help to control appetite for a more slender self.
Today, because of scientific work at the Chile Pepper Breeding Program at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, growers can breed a new cultivar in seven years, can take the heat out of the most pungent pod, create a deeper shade of red, grow a thicker layer of meat, and an easier-to-peel skin.
And today, in the explosion of interest in cooking with chile and in making fresh salsas, I can find the mushroom-shaped Scotch bonnet along with the beefy poblano, the jalapeno, habanero, serrano, Anaheim, and once in a while, the cubanel and the red Fresno in half a dozen nearby markets.
But it is the New Mexico chile – in green and in its ripe stage of red -- that I crave, the one I first met in 1987 and return annually to savor each summer in Santa Fe. Because it doesn’t travel well, it doesn’t appear in supermarkets outside New Mexico.
But in the Saturday outdoor market in Santa Fe, New Mexico green and red abound. The flavor, says Mark Miller of the celebrated Coyote Café, is “unlike that of any other chile in North America: sweet and earthy, with a clarity that seems to reflect the skies and landscapes of New Mexico.”
If Miller sounds a little like magic realism writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- who gave us chickens with gold in their gizzards -- it is because northern New Mexico is like that. At Santa Fe’s outdoor market, vendors give away edible flowers with any food purchase, so I munched on nasturtium and pansies as I meandered in the market this summer.
Meandering in magic food realism, on the road from Taos to Santa Fe, I bought piñon nuts from a little roadside stand whose vendor explained how Southwest pine nuts grow on native dwarf pines and are harvested only by hand, usually by shaking the trees onto a tarp. The piñon nuts rarely leave the region and are in demand as is or added to salads, soups, sauces, and desserts. They are plumper, with a richer and more resinous flavor than pine nuts imported from the Mediterranean, China, or Mexico.
That night, in Santa Fe, I ate at Café Pascual’s, where Katharine Kagel has been tempting palates for over two decades. My dessert -- well known by her devotees, but not on the menu – was her magical toasted piñon ice cream, rich with egg yolk and heavy cream. Put it on your list of things to do before you die.
Kagel says that “the thing about Santa Fe is that we have a real luxury in being closer to the sources of transformation. We can walk outside and touch the earth; we know the growers personally, who grew the lettuce leaf, how long it’s been out in the field, and that it was just picked in Abiquiu this morning.”
Like lettuce, chile pepper pods are vegetables. Or are they? Botanically, chile pods are berries, though horticulturists call them fruits. But harvested in the green stage, the pods are considered to be a vegetable. When harvested red, or ripe, they are termed a spice. Got it?
Capsaicin, the power chemical in chile peppers, spreads unevenly throughout the inside of the pod and is concentrated in the placental tissue. The seeds are not sources of heat, as most people think. Still, avoid rubbing your eyes after handling pods, even if you’ve washed your hands thoroughly, because the chemicals, which retain their potency through cooking and freezing, have no trouble retaining their bite after a little soap. To dull the pungency of a chile dish in the mouth or throat, use ordinary milk or plain yoghurt.
Mark Miller recommends starting to use chiles for flavor and then moving to warmth and then to heat. His Caribe salsa has tropical, fruity tones based on the Scotch bonnet or habanero chile and combines with pineapple or mango or papaya to be served with grilled fish or chicken. His roasted corn salsa, one of Coyote Café’s most versatile recipes, can be served with chicken, sausage, cheeses, enchiladas, or even as a vegetable dish, and combines the woodsy flavors of wild mushrooms like morels to complement the taste of the roasted corn, while poblanos give it heat.
Hot travel tip
One way to learn what to do with chile and master the flavors of the earthy, fiery table of the Southwest is to take a class (or classes) at the now 16-year-old realized dream of Susan Curtis and her daughter Nicole, the Santa Fe School of Cooking at 116 W. San Francisco Street, just a block from the historic Plaza. Here, the best professional and restaurant chefs in the area conduct 3-hour classes with one or two assistants to peel, chop, and attend to the ovens. The second floor is spacious and airy and looks out over Santa Fe; the state-of-the-art set-up gives everyone a good view of techniques and ingredients; and the pièce de resistance is the meal you are served at the end.
Over the years, I have participated in several of these classes, learning to make such traditional dishes as green chile stew, cheese enchiladas with red chile sauce, piñon butter, posole, and sopaipillas. There are classes in New World tapas, in contemporary Southwestern, in Native American, in fajitas, in Southwest vegetarian and low-carb, in the Southwest breakfast. I invariably leave with a sense of joyous connection to the bounty of the local earth, to the chef’s ingenuity and clarity, and to the other three people at my table.
For those who come to Santa Fe from afar, there is an exceptional package between one of the most charming and intimate hotels, the Inn on the Alameda, and the Santa Fe School of Cooking. The Inn on the Alameda includes one of the best breakfasts around, and that means green chile-stuffed croissants, teeming with roasted and chopped chile plus turkey; choose also from frittatas and chipotle smoked salmon, among other breakfast délices.
Last summer, I asked my cooking school instructor, Kathi Long, for a few extra hints on using chile at home, especially since the school has a marketplace and catalogue replete with cookware, such local foods as chile pods and powders, New Mexico piñon nuts and piñon cocoa, cookbooks, and gift baskets.
Kathi held up the jar of chipotle in adobo ($8), with its serious smoky flavor, and told us to puree it, run it through a sieve, and add it to mayonnaise as a sauce for shrimp and scallops. She also likes to use the school’s dried chipotle seasoning ($6.50) as she would salt and pepper – for heat and for flavor. The little granules are balanced, with a smoky aroma and flavor, and are incredibly versatile.
I brought home a tin last August with my lapful of fresh Hatch chile, and it’s as close as I’ve ever come to an addiction. Kathi uses the dried chipotle seasoning as a dry rub for fish -- especially awesome with salmon, but remember to rub, not sprinkle -- and for meats. She uses it in marinades, and in a vinaigrette with either red or white wine. She sprinkles it on sticks of jicama and celery, adds it to bottled Caesar and tuna and egg salad, tosses toasted croutons with it, makes a chipotle butter for garlic bread, and -- get this -- she rubs it on the meat for her Philly cheese steak!
This summer, when I spent two weeks in Taos and two in Santa Fe, I checked in with the celebrated award-winning Joseph Wrede, of Joseph’s Table in Taos, about fresh green chile. Wrede, who uses only organically grown chile, serves a chocolate chile cream dessert and a tropical sorbet of mango with a touch of lime and candied habañero chile. For lamb ribs, he and his Chef de Cuisine, Damon Simonton, 43, make a mole using five chiles, and fresh squash blossoms with New Mexico goat cheese mixed with fresh green chile and roasted corn. There is no end to creating with the chile.
Simonton spent his formative years in Taos and remembers a contest every year for the best green chile stew. No tomatoes, and no beans, said the rules. Today, Simonton keeps a huge fire pit in his backyard with a screen over it for roasting the fresh autumnal chiles. He uses the dried branches of his plum, his apple, and his cherry trees for a fruity edge to his roasted peppers, and when they are sufficiently blistered and charred, he cools them in a tub of ice water and then stores them in the freezer in Ziploc bags. Wrede and Simonton advise not peeling the roasted peppers until just before use, since the skins protect and preserve the oils which hold the complexity and intrinsic flavor. So defrost the peppers in the refrigerator overnight, and the skins will simply slip off with ease.
The two chefs agree that a great way to eat a chile pepper is to roast it, salt it, and eat it, recognizing that each individual pepper on the same plant and branch is distinct, depending on the quality of the soil, the outside temperature fluctuation, whether a chile pepper is rained on or sprinkled, even the angle of a single pepper to the sun. They also laud the fruity Chimayo red pepper. And for both chefs, the romance of the roadside iron roasters ends with the propane gas odor that infiltrates the peppers.
Kids in northern New Mexico grow up with a few strips of green chile on their grilled cheese sandwiches, Eske’s in Taos serves green chile beer and that’s a fact, but it’s no more than legend when they say that Taos whiskey is made of corn, tobacco, chile, and gunpowder. Right?
This summer, in a hands-on class on chile with Santa Fe School of Cooking’s Daniel Hoyer, I picked up information while I roasted green chile with ease on the stovetop grill that the school sells: the average New Mexican family uses 45 pounds of green chile a year; you can get green chile on your McDonald’s hamburger here; if you ask for Christmas, you get both green and red chile; the chile is New Mexico’s official state vegetable (though it’s really a fruit); honey, as well as milk, cream, or yoghurt can calm the heat of a hot pepper; and Ben Gay uses chile in its heat rubs.
I also indulged and savored bowls of Gypsy Stew and Green Chile Stew (Critics’ Choice Award in the millennial year) at the Dragon Room Bar of The Pink Adobe, Santa Fe landmark since 1944 and best known as “The Pink.” Both recipes are recounted in their own the pink adobe cookbook ($25) where actor Larry Hagman says he eats a bowl of their Gypsy Stew for breakfast in winter every morning and never has a cold, while Don Meredith, football Hall of Famer says, “Pink Adobe Green Chile Stew is what I do.”
Hot non-fiction
There are several essential books for the chile-addicted or the beginner. The Whole Chile Pepper by spicy food authorities Dave DeWitt and Nancy Gerlach (Little, Brown, $23) tracks the chile from its beginnings more than 10,000 years ago through vanished Aztec and Mayan cuisines, across the Caribbean, and to Europe with Columbus. The authors provide 350 pages of lore, science, cuisine, and cultivation for the backyard gardener. Recipes from the world over are included, with even the simplest apple-jicama salad and green chile dressing an ultimate in health and taste.
For those who have eaten fresh New Mexican chiles or seen them hanging in lush ristras on adobe houses, there is Carmella Padilla’s The Chile Chronicles; Tales of a New Mexico Harvest (Museum of New Mexico Press, $19.95). Padilla, whose family has produced chile in New Mexico since the Spanish conquest four hundred years ago, thinks of her family as chile connoisseurs and sees the pungent chile pod as a reason to eat. She follows the nine-month chile growing cycle up and down 350 miles of the Rio Grande, where 60% of the United States chile is grown. Padilla and the farmers know that chile today is about science, economics, and enterprise, but the essays and pastoral photographs of the farming families show how they give everything to honor the tradition of their ancestors. A great book.
The classic, if not essential, guide to chile is Mark Miller’s The Great Chile Book (Ten Speed Press $14.95). Miller guides the reader to over 90 of the world’s most popular chiles, with a life-sized photo on each page, followed by recipes and sources. An anthropologist who traveled the world captivated by the tastes and aromas of its marketplaces, Miller ultimately settled in New Mexico to be close to the home of the chile. He is right on target when he says that “in New Mexico, the mysterious spirit of the chile hangs in the air and pervades the shadows.”
Chile Dreams
It does indeed “hang in the air.” In late August and into September, Taosenos and Santa Feans use the vocabulary of magic realism to describe the perfume of roasting green chile in their streets. In Taos, they line the roads and parking lots for three weeks to buy the green chile in bushels and huge sacks ($13 a sack), fresh or roasted in the heavy mesh, propane-fired drums. Some grill the chiles at home and use them five times a week, at least, in their morning eggs and evening stews, and then store them for the year in freezers, until the next aromatic August.
My own half bushel of fresh Hatch, New Mexico chiles -- picked in the early morning by the farmers who grow them, driven to Santa Fe, and roasted for those who prefer it in large iron drums on the side of Cerrillos Road -- sits on my lap on the plane home, and I am no longer surprised when complete strangers parade down the aisle just to seek the source of the seductive aroma.
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