Wonza Sinclair, chili fanatic, vividly recalls how, at a roadside taco stand outside Ojai, Calif., she met her first chipotle.
“It came on its own little plate,” Sinclair, a database administrator for New York City, said of the ripened, smoke-dried jalapeno pepper. “I took a tiny, tiny bite. It was very hot. However, right after you realize it is terribly hot, you were falling into the arms of the complicated smokiness. It was love at first burning bite.”
Many chefs find a lot to love in chipotles.
For Bobby Flay, chef and owner of Mesa Grill and Mesa City in Manhattan, chipotles are indispensable.
“When I walk around the kitchen tasting things and some dish kind of needs something, it’s almost always chipotle, because it has such great flavor,” Flay said.
When Rick Bayless, chef and owner of Frontera Grill in Chicago, was a boy, his family ran a barbecue restaurant in Oklahoma.
“I found a lovely similarity of flavors between the barbecue I grew up with and the dishes that were flavored with chipotle,” Bayless said.
Josephina Howard, owner of Rosa Mexicano in Manhattan, said her research has traced the origin of the chipotle to a Mexican village, Misantla, near Veracruz. The word comes from the Aztec for “smoked chili.”
Unlike other chilies, jalapenos cannot be air-dried. To be preserved, they must be smoke-dried. That process adds the smoky taste and concentrates the heat of the chili.
Chipotle (sometimes spelled “chilpotle” and pronounced chee-POHT-lay) are more than halfway up the chili pepper scale of fieriness.
Chipotles can come either canned, usually in a rich, dark, spicy tomato sauce called adobo, or dried.
Canned chipotles in adobo sauce are available in many supermarkets and grocery stores under brand names like La Morena, San Marcos and Herdez.
Goya has a chipotle “in spice sauce,” which is essentially the same as adobo.
The canned chipotles are dark reddish-brown. They are uniformly hot and give fairly predictable results. You can put the contents of the can into a blender or food processor to make chipotle puree.
But the sodium level runs high. Two chilies will provide 15 to 18 percent of the recommended daily salt allowance.
Dried chipotles are lighter in color and can vary widely in heat. Before use, they must be seeded and deveined, toasted briefly on both sides in a hot skillet to release volatile oils, then covered with warm water for a few minutes until they soften and plump up. The soaking liquid can become bitter and is usually thrown away.
