Our car smells like roasted chiles.
The end of summer and beginning of fall is chile season, and across the southwest — including here in Colorado — that means you’ll find many a roadside stand selling a variety of chiles.
Choose your bushel(s) and they’ll be poured into a steel roasting drum rotating over a propane-fueled flame that reaches up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. The air around these stands that pop up on roadsides and parking lots smells like roasting peppers — it’s like how in DC the air smells like weed (I appreciate that irony). Once they’re perfectly charred, the chiles go into big plastic bags, where they steam and cool so that you can easily peel them at home.
(If you’re curious about the emissions from so many stands using propane to roast their chiles, it’s not an insignificant number; in New Mexico, roasting chiles releases 7,800 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or the same amount as driving 1,700 cars for a year. This year a lab in Albuquerque roasted chiles using concentrated solar power, which proved it could be done; next they’re working on making smaller, portable solar-roasting systems that could be used for chiles and other foods, too.)
Hatch chiles from New Mexico are probably the most well-known. But Colorado farmers think their chiles are better. One variety that seems particularly popular, the Mosco, was introduced relatively recently, in 2005. They have a thicker flesh and grow larger than other similar (read: Hatch) chiles. As described by History Colorado:
The Mosco chile was a labor of love by Dr. Mike Bartolo and his team at the Arkansas Valley Research Center. Dr. Bartolo is a vegetable crop specialist with Colorado State University, and his family has been in the Pueblo area for generations. His uncle Harry Mosco (for whom the chile is named) was a farmer who like most in the area grew, among other things, Pueblo green chiles. When he passed away in 1988, he left his family the seed stock.
Dr. Bartolo began growing a new crop of chile from this stock, and quickly noticed one very unique plant. “It was a little bit bigger and a little bit different from the rest of them,” he said. “I began making selections out of that original plant, and after several years of selection we developed what became known as the Mosco.”
And as Dr. Bartolo tells Gustavo Arellano in this NPR article, Colorado’s ample sun, high elevation, and temperature extremes — going from low to high temperatures in one day — likely improve chiles’ flavor.
We got a bushel each of poblano and Mosco chiles, which we peeled and packed into quart-sized zip-top bags to stash in the freezer. So far we’ve added chopped Moscos to soups and stir-fries; we will obviously also make chili one of these days. Poblanos are probably my favorite pepper — so versatile! so LARGE! so tasty! — so I might be a little more excited about those. (Mostly I’m looking forward to making all of the recipes Teresa Finney shares on her Patreon — many feature poblanos.)
Today, though, I’m sharing an exceptionally easy dip that you can make even if you don’t have access to freshly roasted Mosco or Hatch peppers, thanks to those little cans of Hatch peppers you’ll find in basically any grocery store across the US. I don’t remember when I had first had it, only that it was in the context of visiting my sister. (I asked my brother-in-law where the recipe came from and he said it was just a better version of something he’d bought from a grocery store.)
The dip is: one 16-oz thing of sour cream, one to two cans of diced Hatch green chiles, and plenty of freshly cracked black pepper. Serve with chips, preferably Ruffles. And that’s it! (Kind of hilarious that such a thing could be purchased pre-made.)
“But Kara, surely this needs more salt,” you say. If you’re eating this with salty chips, no, it does not. And if you do one better than Ruffles and get Takis Waves, then you really don’t need salt.
If you’re using freshly roasted and peeled Mosco, Hatch, or similar chiles, start with one, taste, then add more if you want more. (And in that case you will probably need salt — canned Hatch peppers contain 120 mg of sodium per two tablespoons.)
The sour cream-as-dip-base feels a little retro, no? I tried finding similar recipes online but the closest thing to it is the “mother of all dips,” so designated by the New York Times in 1995. Apparently “chips and dip” — or maybe more accurately, the American concept of chips and dip — wasn’t a thing until the ‘50s. (Obviously things we’d now call “dips” have been around for centuries, such as salsa, hummus, etc.)
“The Thomas J. Lipton Company in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., claims that California Dip, a simple amalgam of sour cream and Lipton's dried onion soup mix, revolutionized America's eating and entertaining habits and single-handedly created a nation of devoted chippers and dippers,” the article reads. Lipton didn’t invent it — that honor goes to an unknown publicity-shy person in California in 1954, two years after the dried soup mix went to market — but the dip recipe has been on the box since 1958.
I have a small collection of recipe pamphlets from Braeden’s great-grandma, including one for Lipton that was also printed in 1995. (Did Lipton go on a marketing spree in 1995?) It contains “over 101 foolproof recipes!” including not one but six dips: Burrito Dip, Southwestern Vegetable Dip, Spicy-Style Pizza Dip, Traditional-Style Pizza Dip, White Pizza Dip, and, of course, The Famous Lipton California Dip.
While I’m not going to dive into the Lipton recipes just yet, I do want to start trying recipes from the other various clippings, booklets, and spiral-bound community cookbooks. Something to look forward to in future newsletters.
Next time, more chiles: chicken enchiladas in a green chile sauce. It was the last dish of my sister’s cooking I ate, two years ago, after she died. I’m making it for Día de Muertos.