Hey lisarea! Oregon is now civilized!

[Qingdai]

roadted Chiles now available in my hoid.

[Qingdai]

Also I can sit and drink while they roast them

[JoeP]

I looked at the picture and was confused

[lisarea]

So you have nice big sidewalks and trees and bike racks, and now you have roasted chiles too? No fair.

Did you get some? Are you gonna make green chili?

You should, because I am coming over.

[LadyShea]

I want green chile. I will force Hubby to make me some. Have to used canned chiles though which are not as good.

Maybe someone out West could be my SS and make me green chili and freeze it and overnight it to me at great expense.

[Qingdai]

I peeled them last night and I got 5 pounds, so chile verde at least three times this year. Maybe some chile rellenos also.

[lisarea]

Ha ha, I just tried to figure out how to ship already made green chili and I got scared and overwhelmed. (Also: Mad that all 'how to' searches are now dominated by stupid articles from wikihow and their ilk that tell you everything you already know and gloss over the actual information you're looking for.)

If you can get the chiles themselves fresh, they are relatively easy to roast in an oven in small batches.

The place where we've been getting ours ships in the continental US too. I highly recommend the Mosco if anyone wants to do that. Most of the really flavorful (not just spicy) chiles are thin-walled and difficult to peel, and most of the peelable ones don't taste as good, but the Mosco variety was developed specifically for roasting, so it's peelable and it tastes good, and it comes in different heat levels.

The thing is that a basic green chili is really really simple. The only thing that makes it not so easy is peeling and chopping the peppers. So if you wanted to make some from canned peppers that are already roasted, peeled, and chopped, it'd be really easy. I've never used the canned kind, so I don't know what the tradeoffs are, but it's probably worth trying.

In its basic, most simple form, you can make a green chili with just pork, green chilis, chicken or vegetable stock, and salt.

The version I make most often also has tomatillos and a few tomatoes, diced, and then I thicken the broth so it's more stewlike than soupy. And I add a bay leaf during cooking, but in all my faffing around endlessly with different seasonings, I've decided it really doesn't need anything else. (I think of bay leaves as being the justice of the peace of the spice cupboard. Normally, I don't actually taste it as a discrete flavoring so much, but it somehow marries the other flavors in a dish. So it might not even matter. I may just be developing a weird superstition around bay leaves.)

For New Mexican green chili stew, just add diced waxy potatoes.

The funny thing about green chili is that it's a really long tradition in a relatively small geographic area, and has never been really codified in popular culture. So there are a thousand different variations and none of them are considered the default.

Generally, adding tomatoes and/or tomatillos and thickening the broth is considered a Colorado thing. The Frontier in Albuquerque's version, which is really popular in New Mexico, actually uses ground beef I think (some ground meat, anyway) and has potatoes. So they call it green chili on the menu, but it is actually green chili stew. You see that around there sometimes, ground meat in green chili, but nobody seems to really talk about it, and I've never seen it anywhere but ABQ. It's fine, though. Frontier green chili is iconic and it's mandatory whenever I'm in the area.

Everywhere else, it's pork. Some people slow cook and shred it, some people dice and brown it. Vegetarian versions are often little more than green chilis with salt and maybe thickening. Sometimes onions. (I am not at all against onions, but really don't like them in green chili. I'll eat it, but it makes me a little bit sad.)

The only real mandatory seasoning is salt, because it's all about the chilis, although different versions might use cumin, Mexican oregano, cayenne or some other powdered chili, garlic, or something else.

They should ALL be simmered for a pretty long time.

And because stories and green chili are how I roll:

My brother and his wife met and got married in Albuquerque. She's from Algeria, and most of her family is either living there or in France. So they came out and stayed in ABQ for a while for the wedding.

Some time later, my brother and his wife had moved to Pennsylvania, and her family came to visit again. They were at some restaurant and ordered chili from the menu, and they were sorely disappointed that it was the weird red stuff, and thought it was a travesty that they couldn't even get green chili outside the southwest.

[godfry n. glad]

The word on the street I hear is "Hatch chiles. Fresh."

Okay, so that's three words on the street.

[LadyShea]

Oh we make pork green chile when we can (not we, Hubby, but I will say we for short), but we have to use canned chilis in the recipe, and we never seem to have time. It's all confusing with the multiple meanings of chili and I confused you because I was just being lazy asking people to cook for me and ship it.

Hubby is from Pueblo, which is a green chile place. We use a lot of cumin, and I suggested switching the fambly recipe to use Masa Harina as a thickener rather than wheat flour and it's better.

[LadyShea]

Also not even all of the Southwest. Nevada didn't even know green chili. They would be all "green tomatilla sauce? Green enchilada sauce?". Even in Mexican restaurants owned and run by Mexicans. It seems to be a CO and NM thing mostly, and I am not sure whether it originated in Mexico or was developed there in those areas (using whatever was available locally).

[lisarea]

Hatch usually refers the region the chiles are grown in. Most of the time when something says Hatch Chiles, at least from what I've seen around here, it's an Anaheim, a NuMex, or a Big Jim. There is a cultivar named "Hatch," but either I've never had one or I can't tell the difference between them and one of those varieties. They look, smell, and taste exactly like one of those to me.

Big Jims are probably the easiest to peel and are very thick walled, but they're pretty bland. Not just in terms of not being spicy, but they don't taste much like green chiles to me, even if you leave in all the seeds and membranes. Anaheims and NuMex were the usual compromise between peeling and flavor, but usually when I'd get them, I'd use about half those (or possibly that Hatch variety?) and half Mirasol, which got me closer to what the Mosco now accomplishes.

Mosco chiles are also designed for roasting, but they're more like the Mirasol. The Mirasol was always my favorite tasting chile, but it was so thin-walled that when you roast and peel them, there was a lot of waste. Some of the chiles don't even have any skin left at all. It's just a lot of work for very little output. I can't even imagine peeling enough Mirasols to make a whole pot of chili.

This stuff is very complicated, and seriously, buying roasted green chiles in Denver used to be not unlike buying drugs. Things weren't really labeled consistently, and there was a lot of contention about what was even what. There used to be some actually serious not joking fights with sabotage and even violence sometimes among those guys, and you would not ever broach the topic while they were roasting your chiles because they weren't kidding about this stuff and would get mad.

And you can't even Google stories about it now because a) there is a place called "Hatch Chile Wars" in Denver, which IIRC arose from a truce or something among the major factions, and b) we've had more recent chile wars with New Mexico, which the Mosco won for us. Also chili wars, which is a different thing, and I am more neutral on that issue because I like and make both kinds. But anyways, I don't know if there's any animosity about Moscos among New Mexican roasters, so you might not even want to say anything. But if you see them, buy them. They're the best kind. Colorado wins. They've only been on the market since 2005, and they're already taking over from Hatch.

So yeah. Having grown up with violent chili wars enveloping my city every fall like a fragrant, malevolent mist, I was actually pretty surprised to find out that so many people in the US didn't even know what it was.

Oh, ha. I found an article about Moscos!

So if anyone ever mail orders any chiles or if you see them in the wild, get some Moscos.

[Dingfod]

Hatch, New Mexico - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[vremya]

Oooh - send some chiles my way! We don;t have good green chiles here AT ALL. (They can be fresh ones, I'll roast 'em!)

[chunksmediocrites]

I want to mention that Qingdai was in an awesome mood for the rest of the day- not much can overcome the power of roasted chiles.

[Qingdai]

I would hand roast and peel anahaie chiles, like a god damned refugee! Before the invasion of chile roasting gigs, I'd even grow them like an immigrant! Now I'll look at f2f he moscos, but it's a little unnerving that mosco means fly.

[godfry n. glad]

Originally Posted by Dingfod

Hatch, New Mexico - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

That's the ones. Genuine raised on Rio Grande River water chiles. My transplanted Texan friend wondered whether they ever came to the moss-ridden PNW. A quick survey found that foodies (of which there is no shortage here in Puddle City) had generated a 'seasonal' flood of fresh Hatch chiles, straight from New Mexico, every year. That happened this past week in these parts.

TexMex types are evidently reveling in freshness, roasting like mad.