QT 89 – Smoky, Sweet, and a Bit of Heat

Why Hello There, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes quick tips, where we prise diamonds from the roughage, and inspect their facets for their carats. I’m your Jeweler and Jailer, Jon O’Guin. Today’s post is going to be a little…weird? Not in that we’re going to be covering a strange topic, but just that the thing I’m focusing on today doesn’t feel like it belongs at this time of year for most people. By which I mean most White People, because the Hispanic and Latine community (and that WASN’T a typo, but rather me using an interesting new form I learned about recently. No me @, hermano. (oh, good, I’ve started trying to use internet slang in languages I haven’t studied for over 10 years. That won’t come back to bite me in the ass.)) ARE DEFINITELY ready for some smoked peppers, as holiday season in their homes means Tamale season.

Now I want tamales. And they are not less than a dollar here. So I have made myself sad.

But, since they were in Monday’s recipe, and they’re a topic I haven’t really touched on, I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about the smoked peppers, their uses, and what’s going on when we talk about them. Órale, muchachos!

Beam Me Up, Matthew!

One of the first things that some white people bitch about when it comes to smoked peppers (really not pulling any punches here, it seems. You do know WE’RE white, right, me?) is that there are several smoked peppers whose names change when they are smoked. Indeed, almost ALL commonly consumed smoked peppers have a different name when they are not smoked.

And some people claim that this is confusing. Which, to be fair, I understand to a degree. But, on the OTHER hand, you know that pork, ham, and bacon are all pig meat, just prepared differently, so it’s not like this is a TOTALLY unheard-of concept for us.

Sausage is ALSO distinct, but it CAN be made with other meats, so I’ll allow it to be counted as different.

This is actually one of my little pet-peeves, where people fail to inspect their OWN traditions, language, whatever, before labeling something else as “silly” or “confusing”. It’s one of the things I try to fight the most in my posts, and I think part of the root of my discussion on culinary inflexibility. How rarely people take an outsider perspective/approach to our own history, linguistics, traditions, etc, before deriding others. Like…have you guys heard about the adjective order thing?

English, it turns out, has a rather specific Adjective order. As in, “if you put multiple adjectives on a word, you have to apply them in a certain way.” I can give you a big round rubber ball, for instance, but not a rubber round big ball. That just SOUNDS wrong. (The order, by the way, is Number, Quality/Opinion (like, beautiful, bad, etc), Size, Age, Shape, Color, Proper, Material, Purpose/Qualifier, NOUN. There’s some wiggle room on a couple of them, but it’s generally true.)

Nice, a Rubber Sparkle Bouncy glitter ball!

That’s a thing that a lot of native English speakers were never directly taught, but instinctively “know”, in that, if you break it, it bothers them, but they have trouble explaining why. But that weird, precise rule is just ACCEPTED by them, because they were never really taught it, and have never thought about it. So then, they go off and attack how Spanish puts its adjectives behind the words, or how French puts MOST of its adjectives behind, except for a couple important ones. I guess I’m just kind of riffing on Matthew 7:3 here, the whole “calling out a mote in another’s eye, while ignoring the beam in your own” idea. But this little self-righteous pendantry isn’t really the topic. I just wanted to preclude someone complaining about how most of the peppers I’m about to discuss are “The dried form of PEPPER YOU MIGHT RECOGNIZE.”

Speaking of, let’s go with the big daddy of them all!

Chipotle’s the Name, Smokin’s the Game

I wish this background was a lighter color, but it’s clearly a smoker rack, which is GOING to be grey after a while.

If you DIDN’T know, Chipotles are just smoked jalapeños, sometimes stored in adobo sauce. (Which we’ve talked about before. Both the “these are just smoked jalapeños” point, and what adobo sauce is. Or, rather, isn’t.) Another fun fact that I actually JUST learned, and is a really great example of the very kind of “oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense”: Jalapeño is actually a demonym. Demonyms, as we covered before, are the words used to describe people from a specific place, like New Yorker, French, Washingtonian, etc. There’s a city in Mexico named Jalapa or Xalapa: It’s the capital of Veracruz. And Jalapeño is just how you say “from Jalapa”. Like how Habanero just means “from Havana”. (Yeah, most pepper names are STUPIDLY simple) Chipotle, meanwhile, is from an Aztec word. (Which you might have been able to guess, because “TL” is much more common in Nahuatl than English or Spanish…as evinced by it BEING IN THE LANGUAGE NAME.) meaning…”smoked chili”. I TOLD you the names were dumb.

Technically, the most common type you eat in American is called “chipotle Morita” (which is…Spanish for “mulberry” for some reason). It’s warm, but not super hot, with a nice earthy and smoky flavor.

Gua-ja-ja, I have you now, Señor Bond!

Do you expect me to smoke?
No, Mister Bond, I expect you to FRY!

The next chile I want to talk about is the Guajillo chile, which we used in Monday’s post. Guajillos are dried Mirasol peppers, which are about as hot as Jalapeños. Since I’m already on an word-nerd binge, I’ll give some basic stuff for all the peppers: “guajillo” I believe means “Of Guaja” referring to a tribe in Brazil. (Wikipedia claims it means “big pods”, which is a pretty bold claim, since –illo means “little” in Spanish, and the Spanish word for pod isn’t Guaja, but perhaps it’s changed), while Mirasol literally means “Sun-Watcher”, and in addition to being the name of the pepper, is also the Spanish word for Sunflower.   

Guajillos are noted for being surprisingly sweet and mildly smoky along with their heat, and are a common ingredient in mole sauces and in pork filling mixes for tamales, making them hugely popular in Mexico, second only to the Ancho.

Pa-see-ya later, Loser

Look at it, all dark purple and wrinkled. (That will be important in a sec, just wait for it.)

Pasilla peppers are a confusing one. Most things about them are somehow backwards or confusing. For example, their name: as I just noted, -illa means “little” (-illa and -illo mean the same thing in Spanish, just referring to female nouns or male nouns) and ‘pasa” in this context means “raisin”. So the name means "little raisin”...but Pasilla peppers are like, 6 inches long and an inch wide. Are Spanish grapes the size of grapefruits, if you think you can make a “little” raisin this big?

They’re also heavily confused/conflated with another pepper, the ancho. Like, THIS level of conflated.

This is literally the bag of anchos I used for Monday’s post. (And I know they AREN’T pasillas, because of the shape.)

Which is kind of weird. Pasilla peppers are dried chilaca (“old”, because they grow wrinkled) peppers, while Anchos…well, we’ll get to them in a second. But just imagine if someone claimed they had “beef-pork” chops. Those come from different things!

Pasilla peppers are used to make Red Enchilada Sauce, as well as being used in various minor sauces and preparations.

Anchos are not commonly found in Nachos, except Anagrammatically.

Are anchos the prettiest dried peppers? Perhaps.

Ancho chiles (“wide” chiles) are the dried form of the relatively well known Poblano. They’re super popular in Mexico, because poblanos are super popular, being used in Chile Relleno (stuffed chiles), fried in egg white, stuffed for Chiles en nogado (a dish of green chiles in white sauce and either a red sauce or a red topping, mimicking the Mexican flag), and both the fresh poblano and the dried Ancho are common in mole sauce. Anchos are used along with Pasillas to make Red Enchilada sauce.

They’re much LESS spicy than jalapeños. Poblanos/Anchos are typically in the 1,000-1,500 Scoville range, while jalapeños start at 2000, and go up to 5,000. So they’re mostly used for a very mild spiciness and a bit of smoke. Our LAST entry on the other hand…

Smoke Trees, Get Money

The needles of peppers: thin, sharp, and not something you want in your eyes.

The last smoked chile we’re covering today is the chile de árbol, which literally translates to “Tree Chile” (Again. VERY simple names. Poblano, from the last section? Means “from Puebla”.) And it has ONE purpose: It brings the HEAT. Chiles de árbol regularly sit at 15,000 to 30,000 on the Scoville scale. There’s not a GREAT comparison to this, as the Scoville scale is structured weirdly, but basically: it’s hotter than the hottest jalapeño, it’s much LESS hot than a habanero, and it’s a little less hot that raw Tabasco peppers or Cayenne peppers (both 30,000-50,000).  The CLOSEST it can be compared to is a Serrano.

They’re used whenever you want to make a salsa, sauce, or dish definitely spicy, but in a way where plenty of people can still finish a whole meal with it. Like, you know that one thin red salsa, the really hot one you can get at the taco shops? THAT’S chile de arbol salsa.

They’re also used for decoration/coloring a lot, as they don’t lose their bright red color when drying,

And that’s the list. I just wanted to give people an understanding of the kind of chiles we were using on Monday, and some ideas if they wanted to play around in the coming weeks: these smokier, earthier peppers are very good at making salsas that feel more “appropriate” for taco nights in the fall and winter, since they’re less acidic and bright. It’s a nice seasonal shift to try. And the peppers themselves aren’t super expensive: a bag of dried guajillos holds around 8 peppers, and sells for around $3-4. A bag of Chile de arbol costs the same, but holds probably over 20 peppers. So smoked chiles are a great ingredient to play around with, and one I hope you give a shot.

MONDAY: MEAT’S BACK ON THE MENU, WITH EITHER A DUTCH BALL, OR A SOUTHERN SANDWICH.

THURSDAY: IT’S THANKSGIVING, WHICH MEANS WE’RE COVERING A THANKSGIVING SPECIAL.