We've been ordering Hatch chile delivery, roasted and prepped for us at the end of summer each year for a while. They're pretty expensive that way. So this year we decided to get fresh chiles and do it ourselves. It was a great experience but more work than we expected. I think we did it with sort of the minimum investment in equipment that would be reasonable, so that's what I'm going to show you folks. Also, they're better tasting this way!
We bought fifty pounds -- two 25 lb boxes, one was mild (a variety called 1904) and one was medium-hot (a variety called Big Jim). Shipping from New Mexico to Minnesota about doubled the cost, but they were cheaper in these fairly large quantities, so that was good. There are a bunch of online sellers and you can find them with a search, but we bought from https://www.hatch-green-chile.com/ and probably will again next year. The shopping/shipping experience was clear and satisfactory, the chiles got to us in good shape (we did have to trim a few of them for soft spots), and they are fabulously delicious. In doing our research, I read plenty of happy reviews from other vendors, so they're probably good too.
One of the first issues was figuring out how to roast them. In the past, we've occasionally bought a couple pounds of chiles at a local grocer and roasted them on the grill, just by turning them with tongs. It's a workable solution if you just have one batch. The most normal roasting method seems to be in a big rotating drum over strong gas-flame jets. See this video if interested. There are lots of pages dedicated to building your own, but I'm not set up to weld and kind of wanted to roast over hardwood charcoal. I did some research and found this grill-cage that could fit the rotisserie attachment for our grill. So I got both of those and we made it work. As with anything like this, it was a learning process.
It took some trial and error to figure out how full to stuff the cage. About 2/3 was the compromise point for us. Fewer chiles would roast better but take more batches, time, and charcoal. At that 2/3 full mark, they'd still tumble and wiggle about and the heat could get up between them pretty well. Since we had to keep dumping on charcoal to burn it for eight hours or so, sometimes I was roasting over hot coals and other times over licking flames. It caused some variation, and required attention, but it wasn't too much work and none of the batches were bad. Since you end up peeling the skins, it doesn't matter so much that some get more burned that you'd like (though they are harder to peel!). We never timed the batches, we just kept checking on them and pulled the whole cage off whenever we judged them done. We'd roast them until almost done, then toss in some smoking hickory chunks, and drop the lid on.
This won't surprise any of you, I'm sure, but the smell of those chiles coming away from the grill and into the house was heavenly!
It was a good thing that I bought a heavy-duty grilling glove because handling the rotisserie with that cage full of chiles was a little awkward. I wore that on one hand and a regular kitchen-grade oven mitt on the other. I'd pull it out of the rotating socket, take it into the house and set it on the stove. Then the cage had to be pried open which is hard to do at first but gets to be second nature after doing it a few times, even when dangerously hot. The whole thing opens up sort of like a clam's shell, granting easy access to the chiles. Our first few batches, as they tumbled over the heat, some of the stems would poke out through the bars and get caught. Then they were hard to get out of the cage. So I started trimming all the stems with heavy kitchen scissors before putting the next batch back in. You can see in the two pictures of the closed cage, that the chiles have long curved stems, but in the picture of the open cage, there aren't any. They're pretty easy to trim off close to the chile's head.
From there, they went into a bowl or pot, that we'd cover pretty snugly to keep the steam in and help raise the skin off the chile, to ease in the peeling process. It took about twenty minutes between batches and they'd still be hot enough that we were careful when handling them. After a while, our hands got to hurting from the capsaicin or whatever and we donned nitrile gloves, which made us a little less dexterous, but made the heat (of both kinds) less of a problem.
From the steaming-pot, we'd move to the table where we peeled each one. Sometimes the whole skin would slough off in one piece and we'd crow in joy, and other times, we'd have to pick and pick and pick to get the damned things off. Since they were still hot as we peeled, we'd lay them out in big flat layers on our largest plates to help them cool further. When they were cool enough that we thought they wouldn't react badly with the plastic, we cut them into a small, chunky paste with our chopping tool (which was a lot like this, but not exactly) -- which was faster and more uniform than if we'd done it with a knife.
This was one of the worst bottlenecks in the whole process. We had this whole thing running like an assembly line with chiles roasting out the back door, chiles steaming next to the stove, chilles getting peeled and chopped, etc. But if e.g. I was peeling and my wife was chopping, there was a slowdown because peeling takes forever compared to the relatively quick chopping. So we'd bob in and out of these positions and we got it going, but it took some fiddling.
After they were chopped, we spread them into several ice-trays that we bought for this purpose instead of using our regular ones -- we didn't want to risk weird-tasting ice going forward! And then we cycled the trays through the freezer, being sure to keep track of whether we were working with the mild or the hot ones.
And then we quickly bagged them up without letting them thaw at all and we keep them in the deep-freeze like this.
They're so wonderful to have a supply of. We've been putting them on veggie-burgers and chili and nachos and scrambled eggs and just everything! Next year we might need more than fifty pounds!
Let me know if I've left out any important details or you have any questions!
