by Kristen Davenport—All rights reserved
First, let’s set the record straight. Elsewhere in the world, they might spell it differently, but here in New Mexico, there’s only one right way to spell it: c-h-i-l-e.
Not chili. Not chilie. Definitely not chilli.
Got it?
Good
Because here in New Mexico, chile is serious business. We are willing to go to court over chile. We are willing to go into hiding over chile. Our state lawmakers argue about chile and pass laws about chile. We are the only state in the union with an official state question — “Red or green?” — which refers, of course, to chile, green in its fresh state, red when dried.
Several years ago, a friend from the mountain village of Truchas, Sapo Trujillo, brought me a little bag of chile. Unlike most of the deep, musty red chile found in the stores, this one was bright orange.
“Sun-dried chile?” I gasped. “Where’d you get it?”
“Can’t tell you,” he muttered. “He doesn’t want his name and number out there, or everyone bugs him for his chile.”
Trujillo told me that his friend in Velarde grows the chile, slowly sun-dries it in the valley north of Española, incorporates all the seed and flesh, grinds it by hand and sells it only to people he knows.
The chile was great. I begged for more, and he brought me a pound. But I never could get Trujillo to tell me the name of the fellow who grew it.
It helps to have friends in the right places
It’s not easy to find the best chile. Just ask the folks in Chimayó, who sell the valley’s renowned chile to tourists and locals.
“Real heritage Chimayó chile is hard to come by,” said Vikki Tejada, whose family owns El Portrero Trading Post, a little shop next to the Santuario de Chimayó. “We have a long waiting list.”
Real Chimayó chile is always dried in the sun, Tejada said, and only a handful of families in the valley grow enough to sell. “I think we buy from only three farmers,” she said. “There are other people who grow it, but they just do it for their families and friends.”
Tejada said it’s important to distinguish between Chimayó chile and “heritage” Chimayó chile. Anyone can grow chile in the village of Chimayó — but the official strain of Chimayó chile that was grown in that valley for generations is known as the heritage type. Tejada’s store sells seeds for the heritage strain and mostly just takes names for the dry, ground Chimayó chile, which sells out within weeks of its arrival in the autumn.
“The alternative is regular sun-dried chile,” she said. “But that is hard to come by, too. Most people are drying in ovens these days. We contract with growers down south to sun-dry it specifically for us.”
Chile that has been dried in the sun retains a lighter color and sweeter flavor, she said. Chile dried in ovens or using heaters often gets a more toasty flavor. Both are good, but the sun-dried variety costs more.
Several years ago, a group in Chimayó got together to try to trademark the name “Chimayó chile,” an attempt to help preserve the native variety and protect the name from companies outside the area who use it for marketing purposes. The project created an uproar, as Bueno Foods — an Albuquerque-based company that mass-markets chile across the Southwest — had already requested a trademark on the name. Meetings on the issue turned political, with one 2006 gathering attracting both of New Mexico’s senators at the time, as well as the state’s top economic development official, Rick Homans. As of yet, no “Chimayó chile” trademark has been granted to any party, although a company in Southern New Mexico was granted a trademark on the Hatch chile name despite allegations that the company buys its chile from outside the state.
Chile issues have made their way into the state Legislature in recent years, too, with lawmakers discussing how to protect “New Mexico” chile; the Legislature passed laws in 2011 and 2013 aimed at penalizing anyone who claims to be selling “New Mexico” chile when that chile was not grown in the state. Those measures, too, have been controversial among activists and organizers, such as Isaura Andaluz, who says the attempt to protect the name hurts small Northern New Mexico farmers who can’t comply with burdensome state rules regarding proof that products were grown in New Mexico.
Andaluz and her group, the Save New Mexico Seeds Coalition, have also been hoping to convince state legislators to halt research at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces on genetically modified chile.
“We oppose this, because it is going to contaminate our seed stock of all our native chile,” Andaluz said.
Indeed, she said, some NMSU researchers want to tap into the hundreds of small landrace chile varieties across the state, although many of them were genetically similar to one another, because they are often more resistant to disease and cold than the varieties previously bred by NMSU.
“Seeds are living things,” Andaluz said. “They are planted, and they acclimate and adjust to weather, soil and water. So all of our traditional farmers, they’ve been developing these varieties that are really strong in their climate. You take my seed and you grow it up there [in the mountains] and I grow it down here in the valley, and they’ll taste different. The soil and sun and water are different. That’s the beauty of it.”
A valuable heirloom
Indeed, the family chile varieties in Northern New Mexico were in decades past some of the most valuable possessions a family owned. Ask any Northern New Mexico chile farmer where he got his chile strain, and he’ll talk about his grandma’s seeds and how the family saved their own seed over generations.
Matt Romero, the biggest chile farmer at the Santa Fe Farmers Market, got his strain — which he calls Alcalde Improved — from his uncle. His uncle got the chile seeds in the 1980s from the NMSU research station north of Española, which had crossed a thick-fleshed NMSU chile (such as those grown in Hatch for the green chile market) with the “local chile,” which was smaller, gnarlier, hotter and hardier. That variety, dubbed Española Improved, was then brought to Southern New Mexico, where it has been further selected for large chiles with thick flesh. Romero’s variety, meanwhile, retains a lot of its “local” parentage — and is even too hot for the guy who grows it.
“I don’t know if I’m getting old or what, but for green chile, I like the [milder] Big Jim,” Romero said. “The Alcalde chile was technically classified as medium hot, but a lot of people say it is really hot. It’s too hot for me.”
In addition to the local Alcalde chile, Romero grows the NMSU varieties — Big Jim and Joe Parker — as well as more national varieties such as Poblano, Hungarian Wax, Shishitos and Padrons.
But his local chile is the most hardy, by far, he said. In 2012, a lot of Northern New Mexico farmers got hit hard by a late frost on May 31, he said. Many frost-tender plants died. “I lost all my tomato plants, but not a single one of my Alcalde chiles died,” Romero said. “It’s been growing in the same valley for 40 years; it understands late frosts.”
Romero sells a lot of his chile fresh at the Santa Fe Farmers Market and other farmers markets, but he used to spend 80 hours a year or so braiding chile into ristras, which he hung from his Dixon home, to the happiness of all his neighbors. These days, though, he has begun drying his chile in his empty autumn hoophouse, spread out on tarps.
Although Romero plants several acres of chile each year, most of the growers in Northern New Mexico grow much smaller plots for family, friends and neighbors.
Treasured by any name
“We’ve been planting this seed for a long time,” said Estevan Arellano, an Embudo farmer who writes about Northern New Mexico food and culture. “The field we plant, it’s the same chile my mom used to plant.”
He seems surprised if you ask him the name of his chile, though.
“We don’t have a name for it; it’s just what we’ve been planting,” Arellano said. “It’s called local
The chile that comes out of Hatch has a thick meat, because it’s really been bred for the green chile market — and anyone who has roasted and peeled a bushel of green chile in a New Mexico September knows peeling thin-fleshed chile isn’t that much fun. The local landrace chiles were more typically used to make dry red chile, Arellano said.
“My mom used to make ristras,” he said. In the old days, the families would sit around making ristras for days and dry them, then use the chile straight off the ristra. Or, it could be taken and crushed into Caribe chile, or ground into a fine powder. But the meat was usually too thin to be much use as a fresh green chile, Arellano said.
In his research, the first reference Arellano found to chile in the state was in 1580, when an explorer brought some chile seed from its ancestral region in South America into this area.
Still, Arellano said, it’s hard to trace the “local chile” back 400 years. “It’s definitely related to those first seeds that came in 1580, but you can’t trace it directly back,” he said. “But these are very old, very old seeds, definitely.”
His mother, for her part, didn’t try to protect the family variety from crossing with other families’ chiles, he said. In fact, she believed that to keep their chile vigorous, it was necessary to trade seed with family and friends in Chama or El Guique every few years.
For that reason, a lot of growers say it doesn’t necessarily make sense to call one chile the “Chimayó” strain and another chile the “Embudo” strain because it’s probably all mixed up. It’s all sweet. It’s all hot. It’s all good.
This story originally appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican. It is available on their website here.