How Did Green Chile Get So Big in New Mexico?
Text and Photos by Gowri Chandra
Whereas bell peppers are rounded and chunky, New Mexico green chiles are long and skinny—five to 12 inches, give or take.
Amid the isolated chaos of the pandemic, I moved to Santa Fe with my partner. We left Los Angeles, dreaming of another West: one with desert expanse, starry skies, clean air. And cheaper rent.
Having lived all over the country—Georgia, Colorado, Seattle and New England—I’ve never seen one food so fully encapsulate a place as chile does New Mexico. In a testament to its ubiquity, green chile in New Mexico refers both to a plant and a prepared dish, which can vary in consistency from a thick pork-laden stew to a runny salsa. It can be eaten by itself, or drizzled over anything you can imagine.
Green chile is baked into New Mexico’s bones. But I didn’t really understand why. As a food journalist, I realized I had a basic question: What is New Mexico green chile? And why is it so big here? Despite all the articles I’d read about it, none really answered these questions to my satisfaction.
So, I asked Dave DeWitt, a New Mexico-based chile historian who has written more than 20 books. His latest, Chile Peppers: A Global History, came out this year.
New Mexico green chile, DeWitt explains, refers to a pod type: essentially, a shape of chile. Whereas bell peppers are rounded and chunky, New Mexico green chiles are long and skinny—five to 12 inches, give or take. Unlike Champagne, which must be produced in a specific region to be called as such, New Mexico green chiles are defined by their shape, not by where they’re grown. (The debate over Hatch chile, however, is more complicated. The name does refer to where they’re grown, not a variety or pod type. There have been recent efforts to protect this label.)
But my question remained: Why is chile so big in New Mexico? DeWitt’s key takeaway: “New Mexico green chile is a food in addition to being a spice,” he says. And this really is responsible for its culinary importance.
New Mexico chile can be spicy enough to be used as a condiment or seasoning, but also mild enough to be consumed as a vegetable. You can eat lots of it in one sitting, stewed or baked or fried. You couldn’t do that with a habanero, for example—it’s too hot. Chile, by contrast, is spicier than a bell pepper, and fleshier than a jalapeno: it’s the right marriage of structure, sweetness, and spice.
New Mexico green chiles also have a variable level of heat, which is key to their fame. You can really play around with the spice level you desire, building it incrementally. And because of their sweet flavor profile, you can add a lot to a stew and have it be extremely spicy, but still pleasurable to eat. Contrast that with black pepper, DeWitt points out: If you want to make a dish extremely spicy using only black pepper, the amount you’d need to use would render it inedible, sneezeworthy.
Despite the storied history of New Mexico chile, 400 years ago its identity as we know it today didn’t exist. Chiles in the state weren’t characterized by one prominent pod type with shared size, shape, and characteristics. Instead, chile existed in a wider plurality of forms: Some looked like jalapeños, while others were long and skinny.
It is only through genetic selection that chiles grown in New Mexico came to share certain characteristics. (This is not to be confused with genetic modification, which is the process of altering DNA sequences in a lab. Genetic selection, by contrast, is simply the act of saving seeds of particular plants, thereby propagating certain genetic characteristics like spice, sweetness, color, or size.)
It was the Spanish that first brought chile plants to the state, wrapped up with all the pain, suffering, and brutality of colonialism. In her book New Mexico Chiles: History, Legend and Lore, Kelly Urig points to a Spanish colonizer’s journal entry from 1582: “They have no chile, but the natives were given some to plant.” By the time Juan de Oñate ravaged the Pueblo peoples in 1598, it is certain, most historians agree, that chile farming was underway here.
At first, I thought I was reading the texts wrong—how could chile not have existed in New Mexico pre-contact? After all, it’s native to South America and has been a fixture in Mesoamerican societies for centuries. But no chile has been found at archeological sites in New Mexico, although chocolate, for example, has been scraped out of bowls at Chaco Canyon, in the northwest part of the state. This lack of physical evidence, along with written historical records—admittedly colonialist narrative, penned by Spanish men—is what informs the nearly unilateral opinion of historians.
Once chile was introduced to New Mexico, the northern part of the state is where it flourished. This is where Spanish colonizers headquartered themselves, establishing Santa Fe in 1610. It’s the oldest capital city in the United States, older than the country itself.
Over hundreds of years of cultivation in New Mexico, landrace chiles emerged. These are chile strains that are uniquely adapted to the altitudes and terror where they’re grown. Still, not all of this evolution came at the hands of bucolic farmers, or by nature itself. New Mexico State University was instrumental in popularizing green chile—not only by breeding more drought-resistant varieties, but lowering the heat level of the plants themselves. That enabled people to consume more of it in one sitting, and farmers, consequently, to sell more of it.
New Mexicans buy green chiles fresh in bulk in September and October, and get it roasted on-site at grocery stores and U-pick farms.
Still, for much of the 20th century, green chile was only seasonal ephemera, a fall bounty to be enjoyed in the span of a few months. Red chile on the other hand, was and is perennial—it’s simply green chile that’s had time to turn red on the plant. It’s then dried and powdered, to be used in sauces; this is the way most red chile in the state is consumed. Powdered red chile is shelf stable, making it more popular and characteristic of northern New Mexico, where it’s colder and the growing window is shorter, incentivizing food preservation. The southern part of the state, by contrast, features larger farms with longer growing seasons. These farms grow and sell most of the state’s green chile, often to process in canned goods and jarred salsas.
Despite the existence of canning and jarring, however, it wasn’t until the advent of refrigeration that the popularity of green chile soared. Before that, the only way to prolong the life of green chile would be to powder and dry it. Its taste, as you’d imagine, was different from its fresh counterparts; muted, some say, although others cherish it.
Red chile, by contrast, has a sharper flavor profile and a more eye-catching color. This lends itself to a final powdered product that far outshines dried green chile in popularity. Now, you can hardly find dried and powdered green chile. Instead, New Mexicans buy it fresh in bulk in September and October, and get it roasted on-site at grocery stores and U-pick farms. Then, they chop it up and freeze it for near yearlong enjoyment.
I drove through Hatch, about three hours south of Santa Fe. There’s nothing to do there, DeWitt advised. A few others told me the same, admonishing me not to go. But I was curious, and craving pastoral reflection. The drive south is pretty, and a straight shot, all along I-25. Desert, more desert, dry hills. When I got to the town, it was basically one strip: Sparkys, the hamburger and barbecue restaurant with 2,500-odd Google reviews, inexplicably has a Ronald McDonald statue outside. Some tourists were taking pictures outside of it, though the restaurant was closed that day.
I got a corn gordita at La Casa de Los Abuelos, a strip mall outpost. It came thick with ooey gooey mozzarella and strips of surprisingly spicy green chile. All around me were farms, many of them growing green chile, but also cotton, which I hadn’t seen since I grew up in Georgia. That, and pecan trees, tall and majestic.
There aren’t a lot of public-facing attractions in Hatch itself, and even as a journalist, I couldn’t really get access to farms. A couple meetings were set up, but at the last minute, fell through. Harvest, presumably, dominated their priorities.
I didn’t feel the intimacy to green chile here as I’d hoped; that came instead by talking to scholars like DeWitt and Urig, as well as chefs and farmers across the state. To outsiders—of which I’m arguably one, having grown up in Colorado and only having recently moved to Santa Fe—green chile can appear as kitsch. Green chile milkshakes, green chile sushi, green chile ice cream. Green chile on license plates. Red chile ristras, those hanging decorations, are in all the touristy stores. But these are reflections of green chile’s profundity, rather than manufactured trope.
A national food magazine called green chile “the pumpkin spice of the Southwest.” In reality, it is anything but.
