I just saw a sign at my local grocery store that they will be roasting hatch chiles next Friday! I’ve never seen that around here, so I’m really excited to get a box.
The question then is, what do I do with them? I’m having a bbq the next day, so I’m thinking of using them make atomic buffalo turds. Do you think they will hold up? What else can I do with them? I’ll also be serving pulled pork with a NC style vinegar sauce and some smoked sausages.
Any that don’t get used will be vacuum sealed and frozen, no worries there
My dad and I grow hatch chiles and he knows how to roast them well so I get both fresh and roasted. I use a combination of the two in a delicious chile blond, if that interests you (6 fresh, 8 roasted per 5 gallons for 1 week, but you could probably use half as much but let them sit for more time).
Hatch chiles can either be mild or hot. The mild are very mild but flavorful. The hot can be around jalepeno hot, maybe less so. Even the hot ones are generally used for a flavor rather than heat, so you can use them any way you might normally use poblano or anaheim chiles. So you can put them in anything that way, but I find they have the best flavor where they aren’t hidden under a bunch of other ingredients and work really well with cheese. I just made some hatch chile and queso fresco-stuffed chicken breasts that are excellent. They could make a really interesting addition to a slaw with your BBQ. Not sure if they would shine in buffalo turds.
I just got mine this weekend. Made a big batch of guacamole with some, since avocados are also in season right now.
Chili verde for sure. It tends to be a really simple recipe: shredded pork, chicken stock, tomatillos, garlic. I put in one habanero to kick it up a bit.
The bigger chiles make great poppers for people who can’t handle jalapeño-level piquancy. Cream cheese filling, wrapped in bacon and grilled… awesome. Edit: But apparently that’s an ABT, more or less.
Tom, I like to roast them over a burner and slip as much of the skin off with out rinsing the chiles. Then lay the chiles out on wax paper and roll them up and freeze. Then I can peel one off whenever desired.
They are rather thin-fleshed for their size so be careful roasting them in quantity- they can get overdone quite easily. IMO the “hot” isn’t very hot though they can lend a very nice edge to a dish without being mouth-searing. :o
Also, these chiles dehydrate very well. I still have a couple pods left over from last year.
Tom, we’ve had them since the 8th but I haven’t bought any as of yet. For what I use them for my preference is poblanos. And I can get a rather wide selection of Hatch-chile products year round compared to a couple years ago when there was only these little cans of the hot and mild chiles available.
I like it euge, I’ll package them like that. Good idea.
Chile verde sounds good - I could do half of the butt (15 lbs total) for NC pulled pork and half as chile verde. Hmmmm . . . would it be bad to smoke the pork for the chile verde or does it really have to be cooked with the chiles and stuff? I would shred it and then cook it further in the chile, but maybe that would throw it off.
Some ABTs, maybe shove some in a fatty, what else? The smoker and grill will be going, we plan to be outside the whole day so I don’t want to do anything that requires frying or an oven.
Thanks for the ideas, keep them coming! Surely you guys do stuff witht them besides chile verde, right?
You could, but I wouldn’t. You want any drippings from the pork to end up in the stew. If you braise the pork in the stew that part takes care of itself.
I also think the smoked meat flavor wouldn’t mesh well with the smoked chile flavor, but I could be wrong.
Living in the south, I was never really exposed to hatch chiles but once I moved to Denver, I became addicted. There is a great little stand near my house that pops up this time of year and roasts them there or you can get them raw…I usually will get a lot of both! Here’s a couple of things I do with them:
1. Green Chili - Don’t think I’ve made it the same twice, but great comfort food while the weather gets cooler and football starts to ramp up. Eat in a bowl, on top of an omelette, top off a burger, makes some phenomenal nachos.
2. Green Chili Sauce - I like to caramelize some onions, add a little jalapeno (try the green chiles first, sometimes they are spicy enough by themselves,others it needs a little kick), throw in some garlic then add a little flour to make a quick roux. Add in a little chicken stock, a little apple cider vinegar and toss in the green chilies and let simmer for about 15 minutes. You can mix up w/ a hand blender or in a blender to get is more saucy, but what I do is blend it w/ a hand blender and add some chucks of green chiles afterwards to give the sauce more texture. This sauce goes well with just about everything and gets better over time. Perhaps my wife’s favorite is when I use the sauce to make fresh Chilaquiles. It’s her favorite thing to wake up to on a fall/winter Sunday morning.
3. Green Chili Strings - I like to cut the chiles up into thin slices, soak in butter milk, dredge in flour and fry them up. We use them to top off a burger, top off our Mexican Lasagna casserole, top off the green chili, dress up breakfast quesadillas, or eat them straight. We’ll also cut them up into small rings and fry them up. Fresh ones work better than roasted ones for frying, gives them a little snap when you bite into them.
4. We’ve made jack-cheddar-green chili bread w/ some spent grains that turned out well. Slice it up and dip into a warm bowl of green chili.
We use them for a lot, but these are some of our favorites. Now the question is, who out there has made a green chili beer?
I used some in a Vienna Lager last year. It was a big hit. 8 oz of peppers (for 5 gal), de-seeded and coarsely chopped, sanitized in vodka and added after fermentation.
I’ve used pulled pork for several quickie chile verde’s. Works ok but instead of shredding it’s better to chill the desired amount of smoked pork and then chop/cube it. Make your chile verde and add the meat at the end and only simmer it for 10 minutes or so. This way the pork remains succulent and the dish is lower-fat.
I’m always so jealous of your grocery options! My pepper selection usually runs from Green Bell to the very exotic Red Bell. Sometimes there’s Scotch Bonnets (haberneros?) and jalapeno’s that’s it. In my Mexican cookbook string Nateo mentions a bunch of chile’s and I had to smile cause I’ve never heard of any of them.
Enjoy your chile’s Tom and please have a Fin du Monde with them in honour of your under-privledged neighbours to the North.
I made some roasted hatch chile salsa on Sunday,
Split into two 32 ounce containers.
I then put 7 ground ghost peppers into one
and 14 into the other.
What can I say I’m a pepper head!!!
My wife found some hatch chiles at a different store, already roasted and cooled, so got some and a whole chicken, spatchcocked it, peeled and chopped some chiles then mixed it with minced garlic, lemon zest, and olive oil, then rubbed the chicken with it. We grilled that for dinner, served with a side of chiles (and some boiled new potatoes and a nice salad - awesome.
I’m rethinking the 25 lb box I was going to get - that’s a LOT of chiles. We’ll see. I think raw for the ABTs though. The heat on the ones she found today were perfect for eating as is, a bit of burn but nothing to make you sweat. The ABTs should be mild enough for most of the people, not like the ones I made with jalepnos last year.
We’ll make some salsa with the rest of what she got today I think.
Tom,
What are you putting in yours? I do onion/chive cream cheese, pulled pork, wrapped in bacon, sprinkle my rib rub, smoke for 2 hrs. Just did 100 for the Savannah Brewers League golf outing.
Got a pig roast to go to tomorrow so I’m taking ABT’s (which I’ve never heard of before this thread). Got 35 jalapeno’s and also a bunch of small, jalapeno shaped sweet peppers (red/orange) for those who don’t like the heat.
The thought of “little smokies” in them sounds absolutely disgusting. I’m gonna put shrimp in 1/2 and pineapple chunks in the other 1/2 (at least of the hot ones). Haven’t seen anything using pineapple but I think the sweetness will help cut the heat.
Just be careful of the shrimp over cooking, otherwise that sounds awesome! I’ve never made these w/ meat and I’m w/ you, the little smokies just don’t sound very good, but I guess you never know until you’ve tried em’. I’ve always mixed my cream cheese w/ some caramelized purple onions, lime juice and cilantro and skipped adding additional meat in them, but have tossed around the idea of putting some andouille or Portuguese sausage in them (take the casings off and shape the meat inside the peppers). Just got a bushel of hatch and Anaheims, so I just may try adding some meat to my ABTs. Looking forward to how your shrimp ones turn out.
