Growing up next door to New Mexico I fell in love with the delicious Hatch chile pepper. These meaty peppers go great on anything and everything, from a burger; to a great add in for things like gravy, or heck even on their own. Every year, late August and early September, you can usually find a roaster (think of a giant hand crank bingo machine or raffle tumbler full of chiles over flames) outside of one of your grocery stores cranking out some charred chiles for your pleasure. Unfortunately, I left the lands of the desert and decided this year when chile season rolled around I was going to try my hand at roasting them. Yes, these are the same peppers that are dried and bundled together for those decorations (that some use for cooking) that you often find around the Southwest.
To start out my adventure in roasting I ventured down to Central Market here in Houston, since I saw a flyer promoting their version of the Hatch Chile Festival. I am sure it has nothing on the real deal, but considering I am currently over 800 miles away from the epicenter of the Hatch chile universe (Hatch, NM go figure) I figured it was the best I could do.
They certainly didn’t disappoint, they had crates full of these green beauties in varying temperatures, and even a few roasters outside (I picked up a bag of roasted ones just in case my experiment failed, didn’t want to be left out). For those of you who may not be the biggest fans of heat, or like me and you don’t read signs once you get overwhelmed by sheer awesomeness and mobs of people, you are in luck because the chiles come in varying heats ranging from mild to hot.
So I get the chiles home and decide to start the roasting, now the issue I found was that an infrared grill does not necessarily cook chiles quite the same was as an open fire grill so it definitely took longer than expected but the end result was still awesome.
The chiles start to blacken with the skin swelling up and popping, this is important for a step you will see later. The smells were amazing, a nice fire roasted spicy smell just filling the air and making me drool all over myself (not really but you get the idea).
The chiles get a nice blackened look to them, and the skin was visibly loose I decided they were good and pulled them off the grill.
Once you remove the chiles from the grill, throw them into a zip lock back (may want to double bag it because they can melt through), this allows for the chiles to essentially steam themselves while you wait a few minutes.
Once they are cooler (this is important since you will be handling these) take them out of the zip lock back and begin to run them under some cool water and break the skin. If it is roasted right, the skin will basically peel off in sheets (another side note here, if you went with hot wear gloves, these are peppers and they will burn your eyeballs when you forget about it taking out contacts later… speaking from experience), once the tough waxy skin is off you are left with the delicious tender meat that kind of resembles a slug but I am sure it tastes better (not speaking from experience on that one).
So here you have a bag of mushy peppers now and you might be asking yourself “What the heck do I do with these things?” The simplest answer I found is “Whatever the hell you want!” One my favorite meals is to take a tortilla, lay a chile in it, and put some cheese on it and toss it in the microwave, simple and flavorful and quite frankly awesome.
I also made a dish that visually looked disgusting so you get no pictures, but I took a chicken breast seasoned with some fajita seasoning and cooked it up, tossed in a few chopped up chiles and let them all marry together. In the end you get a bowl full of chopped up garbage that tastes like a party in your mouth… And let’s be honest, who doesn’t love a party in your mouth?
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