Fresh Hatch Green Chile Peppers

My Hatch Green Chile Peppers Arrived! Now What?

It’s an exciting day when that box of Fresh Hatch Green Chile Peppers arrives. Beautiful bright green, fresh and crisp, smooth and heavy for their size. Those treasures are fresh and ready! They will try to turn red and ripen, then shrivel and get tough. They need to be roasted and used, frozen, or canned while they are at their peak. The process of fire-roasting involves scorching the outside waxy layer, creating a charred surface that allows for the removal of the outer skin without damaging the “meat” inside of the chile. This process also enhances the flavor of the chile meat.

For newcomers or small-batch chile roasters, there are three main methods of fire-roasting green chile at home: gas stove tops, stove ovens, and backyard gas or charcoal barbeque grills. If you need a more in-depth how-to on how to roast your chile peppers, please follow the links above on each method, or you can watch our quick How-To Tutorial Video. All of these home-roasting methods require practice, but the aroma and taste of fire-roasted chile will make it well worth the effort.

Before roasting, prep yourself and your chiles. Remember that capsicum oils in chiles can irritate your skin. You can wear rubber gloves for protection or thoroughly wash your hands afterward, or before touching your face and eyes, with rubbing alcohol or soap and water to remove the capsicum oil from your skin.

Roasted chiles should be refrigerated within two hours of roasting. They may be kept in the refrigerator and should be used within three days.

Roasted chiles can also be frozen, peeled, or unpeeled. Frozen chiles should be used within a year. Pack your chiles in freezer bags or shallow freezer containers. Remove as much air from bags as possible to reduce surface crystallization. Cool the packages of chiles in an ice bath or in the refrigerator before placing them in the freezer. Freeze the packages in a single layer, then stack them for storage when they are frozen solid.

Hatch Chile Recipes

Here in the Southwest, particularly in New Mexico, we have a staple food group here. That would, of course, be Hatch Green and Red Chile Peppers. Being the case, there are so many wonderful and delicious recipes that incorporate this gorgeous little plant to the fullest extent possible. Whether that be adding just a little ground up chile powder to an egg or eating a whole chile pepper simply by itself with a little salt and pepper, and everything in between.

Seeing that there are so many options for the utilization of Hatch Chile we have devoted two blogs to the discovery and use of these awesome little peppers. Our first blog is chalk full of recipes that we have curated form our own imagination and popular recipes from across the globe, including Hatch Red Chile Stacked Enchiladas, Hatch Green Chile Verde, and Hatch Green Chile Cheeseburgers and so much more! You can view the full blog on our website by following This Link. 

We also have another blog devoted to the sharing of recipes that are submitted to us from our amazing and loyal customers from our Facebook Page and from our neat little group called Fresh Chile Cookin'! You can join this group, if you feel so inclined, and learn just how much we all love and use chile to the absolute max! To view our featured Customer Recipes blog you can follow This Link, and see just how much we don't know about the use of Hatch Chile... Thankfully our customers pick up the slack for us when we just plain don't know what else to put Hatch Chile into. A special thanks to all of our customer that contribute to our little operation, many blessings and eat more chile!