‘Part of our culture:’ Chiles in New Mexico

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Aug. 31—Do you have decorative Halloween or Easter chiles in your home? Or are you growing Big Jim peppers in your backyard?

Chile varieties like these can be found at New Mexico State University's teaching garden, which hosts more than 150 different varieties of chile peppers. With chile harvesting and roasting seasons underway, farmers are picking chiles off the fields for roasting orders around the state.

So what's on the menu?

That's the theme for NMSU's teaching garden this year.

How chiles got here

April Beauchemin is a program specialist at NMSU's Chile Pepper Institute, a research and education organization focused on chiles. The institute has been around since 1992, and more than a decade before that, NMSU student and well-known horticulturist Fabián García started researching and standardizing chile pepper varieties at NMSU.

"Chile is such an important part of our culture, not just agricultural industry-speaking, but as New Mexicans," Beauchemin said.

Humans can digest pepper seeds. Birds can't.

That's how chiles arrived in New Mexico.

Beauchemin explained that as birds migrated from South America to Central America to the southwestern U.S., they deposited chile seeds called capsicum chacoense.

The chile seeds that adapted to the land over time are called landrace varieties, often named after the area where the seeds were collected, according to NMSU. From Chimayó to Nambe Pueblo, New Mexico has dozens of landrace chile peppers today.

The landrace peppers tend to be pretty hot, though, Beauchemin said, and researchers developed milder chiles more tolerable to the public.

For example, she said, García, one of the first attendees of NMSU in 1888, developed the chile variety NuMex No. 9, which eventually led to the development of the Big Jim pepper, one of the most popular chiles grown in Hatch.

"Big Jim was an actual farmer that was in Hatch," she said. "That's something that I love is that in Hatch Valley a lot of varieties are named after people. So there's Big Jim and Ms. Junie, and Ms. Junie was Big Jim's wife."

The Ms. Junie pepper tends to be hotter than Big Jim's consistent meaty pods NMSU recommends for chile rellenos.

Both varieties are present in the teaching garden, along with other chiles, like very hot Chiltepin pepper, which is often sun dried, and the NuMex Centennial, an ornamental pepper that changes from purple to yellow, orange and red developed for NMSU's 100-year anniversary.

Other ornamental dwarf peppers like Halloween chiles that start purple then turn orange and Easter chiles that start lilac then turn orange also populate the garden.

The university's teaching garden is only used for educational purposes, like teaching students or the public about cross-breeding or diseases that contaminate crops.

The peppers in the garden aren't isolated, so varieties eventually mix with each other, unlike the caged peppers on research plots across the street that went through several years of trials.

Red or green?

Beauchemin said as chile pods grow, they start green.

"When we say that the pod is mature green, it means that you can pick the green off, roast it and eat it as is, and it's not going to have that earthy flavor," she said.

But if the plants remain unpicked, they mature into a red color, she said.

"The same plant gives us both green chile and red chile," Beauchemin said.

She said red chile is the more traditional way to eat peppers, and consuming green chile only became popular in the past 50 or 60 years, with the exception of Big Jim.

Big Jim and the Sandia select, an improvement on the original Sandia pepper, started the green chile craze, she said. The skin on those peppers pulls away from the flesh easier upon roasting, she said.

"It's a more tolerable flavor for the masses because without that skin, you're not getting the bitterness that is there with the red chile," Beauchemin said.

She said she's had more bad red chiles than green chiles, which can be extremely bitter without the right amount of acids and fats added into the chile sauce.

"That's why red chile is usually not as popular," she said. "It is more of an acquired taste."

NMSU's teaching garden is open to the public for walk-ins or guided tours. More information can be found at www.cpi.nmsu.edu/programs/programs-list/chile-pepper-institute-garden-tour.html.

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