Rose and I recently enjoyed a great trip to New Mexico and Arizona. The reason for the trip was a celebration of the life of Bob Dickerman. It’s an inherently sad reason for folks to get together when the person so honored has passed away, but it sure was a great group of people to hang out with.

This is a side story, though.

When we arrived in Albuquerque, we stopped at a grocery store to pick up a few things, and we were delighted to see heaps of big, 35-40 lb. bags of Hatch green chiles. We agreed to return there to pick one of these up after the planned weekend events before heading on to see some of the sights of the southwest.

Unfortunately, when we returned just three days later, there was not a single bag of chiles left in the store! This community sure loves its chiles! But a helpful clerk checked around and found that another store a few miles away still had some. Off we zoomed in our rental car to make a chile connection.

The original pile of bags we had seen had four different tag colors, corresponding to the heat of the chiles. A nice chart gave the meaning of each color. We didn’t remember the code, but here there were just two colors: blue and red. The chiles we’d laid in back in Fairbanks were extremely mild, so I thought what the heck, red is probably hot, so let’s get a bag of those.

A gunny sack of New Mexico chiles stowed away in our luggage and got a free ride to Fairbanks

We treated them like a royal guest for the rest of the trip, making sure they were as cool and comfortable as we could make them, rotating them and giving them air. Every hotel room we stayed in smelled fabulous once the chiles had rested there awhile.

When the time came to pack up and go, I put the whole shebang into a contractor bag and then a duffel bag we’d brought along for the purpose. We get free checked bags with Alaska Airlines, so shipping them home cost nothing.

Back home we got to work right away to get them roasted and preserved. First they are washed and set out to dry, and then we put them on a hot grill to roast, flipping them when one side is done so both sides are well roasted. They do this differently in New Mexico, but we don’t have the special setup they have and so have to make do. Wow, does it smell good!

New Mexico chiles ready for roasting (they ripened a little on their trip, thus the red).

When they are done, we put them into a closed paper bag for 10-15 minutes so the skins get nice and loose. Then they are—usually—ready to be bagged and frozen. After we’d gotten through more than half the chiles, I finally tasted one. And found it to be not just hot, but very hot. Yow! I tried some more, and while there was variation, even with the seeds removed these buggers were on average really, really hot. The flavor was exquisite, but Rose was not able to eat them and they were trying even for me. They were too hot to treat them as we usually did, so we bagged them and put them in the fridge to figure out an alternative. We had stopped roasting them, too, and still had a good quarter bag left. These we left out to dry.

Roasting chiles on a snowy day.

The next day my brain worked on this and I came up with an idea that would probably work. On the next few evenings, I processed the roasted peppers in a different way. I cut them open, took off the stem and seeded them, peeled them if they were easy or left them with the skins on if they weren’t, then piled these into a food processor and pureed them. This concentrated paste is amazingly flavorful and useable in small doses. I got some 3-oz. waxed paper cups at the store and used these to freeze the paste in small, useable amounts. Once frozen, I topped them off with some water to prevent freezer burn. In thawing, I just tip the cup so the water runs off. Otherwise it’s no big deal to have a little looser paste if it soaks in.

Hot, roasted pepper paste in useful doses. A powderkeg on the tongue.

It might take awhile to learn how to use hot roasted pepper paste, but we’re off to a good start. I’ve been eating it in small doses as salsa on a burger bun or with guacamole and chips. A little too much made a batch of caribou stinkum roar. Last night I used a whole one of these fantastic flavor powderkegs in a pan of Rudolph enchiladas, and Rose gave it a thumbs up, so I think I’m getting the dosage right. We’ll continue to experiment!