Roasting chiles
Poblanos, Anaheims, and Hatch chiles come in together in late August and are gone by mid-October. This is the short window when they are everywhere, cheap, and often being roasted in a drum outside the market. Nothing else in the year replaces them.
How to choose it
- Firm, glossy, and heavy for their size
- Flat-ish sides char more evenly than deeply lobed ones
- Poblano for stuffing — wide shoulders, thick walls
- Anaheim or Hatch for strips — longer, thinner, milder
- Skip anything wrinkled or light; it has been sitting
Buy this much: 6–8 for the week. They lose about half their volume once roasted and peeled, so this is less than it looks.
Cheapest they will be all year, and cheaper still by the sack. If a market is roasting them on site, that price usually beats buying them raw and doing it yourself.
During the week
- Stuffed with picadillo or cheese
- Strips in tacos and rice bowls
- Blended into the paste for the fish
- On the sheet pan with delicata
On a weekend
Blended with garlic and lime into the paste for the chile-rubbed mahi-mahi.
One thing worth learning
Charring a chile is not about cooking it. It is about destroying the skin, which is thin, papery, and unpleasant to eat, so that what is underneath can be. That is also why the covered fifteen minutes after charring matters more than the char itself: the trapped steam separates skin from flesh. Skip the steam and you will spend ten minutes scraping. Do it, and the skin slips off in sheets.