Chile Pepper Harvest Season

Above, the chile peppers I bought yesterday. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

The New Mexico chile harvest season is now upon us. This year is seeing a good crop.

I bought some Hatch chile peppers yesterday and I will be making the chile relleno casserole on Wednesday that I made last year. 

I spent some time this afternoon roasting them on the barbecue. The aroma the roasted peppers are giving off is great. Yum!

This year is a good one for the chile harvest indicators say. It is likely due to the winter snowfall and the monsoon rains we've been getting.

The Los Angeles Times posted:

Though there have been efforts to mechanize the green chile harvest, they haven’t been successful, says Kelly Urig, a native New Mexican who wrote “New Mexico Chiles: History, Legend And Lore,” which explores four centuries of chile agriculture in New Mexico. Chiles can only be mechanically harvested when they turn red; at that stage it’s OK to have some damage to the fruit, she says, due to it being ground down anyway. The red chile season lasts about only a month after the green chile season.

Last year’s harvest was poor, severely affected by a record-breaking heat wave, which, Urig says, made the crop more susceptible to disease.

The outcome of this year’s green chile harvest won’t be clear until fall, but Urig and other industry observers are already predicting a very good year.

“This year is going great,” says Urig, whose family once farmed chile in Hatch and now helps process it. “All signs say this harvest season is going to be a very good crop as far as taste and as far as commercial viability.”

Urig, who now lives in San Diego but has much of her family in New Mexico, says she has a plentiful supply in her freezer but still gets excited when she can get freshly roasted chiles. She often buys from her cousins, who operate the Hatch Chile Store.

Urig urges New Mexico chile lovers to avoid getting duped by pepper counterfeiters and support New Mexico farmers by looking for the “New Mexico certified chile” mark on the chile pepper package.

To read the full article, go here.