Market Report:Cold Fire
I know we haven't talked about freezing yet, but we need to: it's chile season.
The contemporary food community's high-minded commitment to a seasonal-local-organic ethos has unfairly led to prejudice against frozen food, which is harshly judged as the opposite of "fresh" in the specifically foodie sense of "fresh" as meaning seasonal, local and, by extension, virtuous. This prejudice is wrong-headed and snobbish.
Freezing is one aspect of saving the season, and we should be thankful to possess the godlike power to create frigidity, ABOVE, in our own kitchens and pantries. Imagine what Cyrus the Great, BELOW, would have made of such magic in ancient Persia? For us, the commonplace electric freezer is beneath notice, but that should not place it beneath contempt.
Gran always froze tons of corn and lima beans from Pappaw's garden, and to good effect, too. Peaches and strawberries are perfectly happy in the freezer and if a frozen peach isn't exactly the same as peach eaten out in the orchard—well duh—then let me at least put it this way: a peach that is seasonal-local-organic in August is just as seasonal-local-organic when you take it out of the freezer for a midwinter cobbler. And I would argue that a home-frozen peach is a much more responsible source of calories, nutrients and flavor than, say, a basket of "fresh" raspberries flown in from Chile.
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Right now we're smack in the middle of pepper season—bell peppers, Hungarian peppers, jalapeño peppers, all of them. And for a very short time, if you're in Cali and parts of the Southwest, you can also get New Mexico chile peppers, which these days are being marketed as Hatch chiles after a town in the state's chile-growing region. Nothing freezes better.
In LA, New Mexico chiles are available over the next few weeks at Bristol Farms, where a company called Melissa's trucks them in straight from New Mexico. They come in hot and mild varieties, and Melissa's sells them by the pound or by the box (just over a bushel). If you get a bushel, they'll roast them for you free right there in the parking lot.
Then what do you do with them? I use them to hot up soups, salsas and and above all posole, hominy stew. I have loved posole since the first one I ate when I was about 22 and visited David Tanis in Santa Fe, where he then had a terrific restaurant called Cafe Escalera. One night at home, he made a posole that was rustic beyond rustic: a cauldron of bones and fatty hunks of meat and great handfuls of whole green chiles, stems and all. Bear in mind that a chile's fire comes mainly from its seeds and skin, where a spicy molecule called capsaicin lodges. (The heat is obviously a biological defense mechanism, a chemical armor, which the plant concentrates at the fruit's exterior and in its seed capsules.) David's posole was incredibly delicious, and incredibly hot. Before that trip, I had never understood one of Pappaw's more pungent curses, which he used to register extreme shock: shit fire.
Yesterday I stopped at Bristol Farm after the Surfas demo to get a bushel of hot chiles (last year I got a bushel of mild and wanted more heat), and since I was the last customer of the day, Melissa's threw in half a box of mild. Thank you! That's a lot of chiles, but not insane. Last night I was able to peel, seed and pack them into freezer bags in maybe 90 minutes. (You can also freeze them whole if you're rushed for time.) I bagged them in 1-pound packs of hot and mild together, and the mixed-bag approach made me think of pimientos de Padrón, a little green chile from Galicia that is likely a close relative of the New Mexico chile. (All chiles are North American in origin: check out this pre-Columbian chile-shaped vessel from the De Young Museum, ABOVE.) In Spain, you eat pimientos de Padrón as a snack, probably standing in a crowded bar, and they are traditionally fried whole in olive oil and scattered with sea salt. For the most part, the chiles they are perfectly mild, but every sixth or seventh one is like biting into a wasp. When that happens, you sweat, gulp a beer and shout out the traditional saying: "Pimientos de Padrón! Algunos pican—y otros non." ("Some sting and others don't.")
When things calm down a bit this fall, I'll take some New Mexico chiles out of the freezer and can a batch of green chile-tomatillo salsa. Check back for results.
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I didn't know you were a green chile head, too! We buy ours from Javier Toscano, a grower near Fresno--yes, they're California-grown, but delicious, and the best of our various options. We roast them over charcoal, whenever possible, and freeze them whole, 8-10 to a bag. If I'm not making enchilada sauce or stew, we usually just thaw and peel them, seed them imperfectly, and chop them fine with salt and raw garlic. That's it. Rico likes LOTS of garlic. I add a bit of vinegar if we won't be consuming all of it within a day or two. In the cookbook I call this "green chile relish." Next time I'm there, we'll have to go down to La Favorita off the 710, get some fresh nixtamal and make a kick-ass posole!