Chipotle

• chipotle

  Spanish — Mexico

  From the Nahuatl for smoked chilli. It is a jalapeño that has been smoke-dried, not a separate variety.

Smoky and sweet with a raisin-like depth, and a heat that arrives behind the smoke rather than in front of it. Meco is markedly smokier and less fruity than morita, which is the distinction worth knowing when buying.

Wood smoke over dried fruit — tobacco, raisin and a little chocolate. None of the green freshness of the fresh chilli survives.

Morita is a deep brownish red and remains supple; meco is a pale greyish tan and is drier and more leathery.

Morita stays leathery and pliable; meco is drier and more brittle. Both rehydrate well and are usually soaked before use.

• Capsaicin — Unchanged by smoking; concentrated by water loss.
• Guaiacol and syringol — Phenolic compounds deposited from wood smoke. These are what chipotle is for, and they are entirely absent from the fresh fruit.
• Sugars from ripening — Raised by the extra weeks on the plant, and the reason chipotle tastes of dried fruit rather than of grass.

Toast briefly in a dry pan, soak in hot water for twenty minutes, then blend — and keep the soaking liquid, which carries a great deal of the flavour. Remove the seeds first if you want less heat; the smoke is in the flesh and survives either way. Use ground chipotle in dry rubs where soaking is impractical, and treat tinned chipotle in adobo as a third ingredient rather than a convenient version of the dried pod.

A smoke ingredient that happens to be a chilli. It carries adobos, moles and barbecue sauces, works into marinades for pork and beef, and lifts beans, tomato sauces and anything that wants depth rather than brightness. Its heat is moderate enough to use generously, which matters because the smoke is what you are buying. It pairs with tomato, garlic, cumin, oregano, dark sugars, chocolate and lime, and it is the natural partner to slow-cooked pork.

• infusing — Soaking in hot water for twenty minutes softens the pod and lets it be blended into a sauce. The soaking liquid carries a great deal of flavour and is usually worth keeping.
• toasting — A brief pass in a dry pan before soaking lifts the aroma. Easy to overdo — an already-smoked chilli goes bitter quickly.
• grinding — Grinds to a coarse powder once fully dry. Ground chipotle disperses evenly and is convenient, but loses the ability to be soaked and blended into a smooth sauce.

Smell it. Good chipotle announces the smoke through the bag; a pod that smells faintly of dried fruit and little else has lost what distinguishes it. Morita should still bend without cracking.

• Faint or absent smoke aroma
• A morita that has gone brittle
• Any white or coloured fuzz, as distinct from the natural pale bloom on meco
• Dusty flatness in the ground form

• Loss of the volatile smoke phenolics, which costs the defining character first
• Oxidation to flat, dusty notes
• Mould on morita held damp — a genuine risk given its residual moisture

Buy whole pods. Chipotle is one of the clearest cases for it: the smoke phenolics that define the spice are volatile and go first from the ground form, and a whole pod can be soaked and blended into a sauce in a way powder cannot. Ground chipotle is convenient for rubs and is a reasonable second jar, not a first one.

• A stated type — morita or meco — rather than the bare word chipotle.
• Morita that still bends rather than cracking.
• A strong smoke smell through the packaging.
• Whole pods rather than ground, where you intend to make a sauce.

Graded by type and by pliability. Morita is smoked less and sold more widely outside Mexico; meco is smoked longer, is greyer and drier, and is generally the more prized. Retail outside Mexico frequently states neither.

Solanaceae

No separate plant. See the jalapeño profile for cultivation and botany; what distinguishes chipotle happens after harvest.

Mexico, where smoking is the traditional answer to a chilli too thick-walled to sun-dry. The technique is documented well before European contact.

• Mexico (Chihuahua and the north) — origin. The principal production region for chipotle specifically, distinct from where jalapeños are grown for fresh sale.
• United States — notable producer

Picked fully ripe and deep red. An underripe fruit smokes into something thin and grassy, so ripeness is the precondition rather than a refinement.

1. Ripening — Fruit is left on the plant until deep red, several weeks beyond the green harvest.Why: Raises sugars and removes the green pyrazine aroma. Without it the smoking has nothing sweet to work against.
2. Smoking — Dried over a wood fire in a closed chamber for several days, turned periodically.Why: Both preservation and flavour. A jalapeño is too thick-walled to sun-dry reliably, so smoking solves a practical problem and creates the ingredient at the same time.
3. Sorting by type — Separated into morita — smoked less, softer, redder — and meco, smoked longer to a grey-brown.Why: Two distinct products from one process, and the difference between them is larger than most retail labelling suggests.

Graded by type — morita or meco — and on size, pliability and colour. Morita should still bend; a brittle morita has been over-dried.

Liquid smoke applied to ordinary dried chilli is the realistic issue, particularly in ground chipotle where the structure is not visible. Whole pods are harder to falsify.

Fruit destined for chipotle is left on the plant several weeks longer than the fresh crop, which reduces yield and raises the price. Growers are choosing between two products at the point of harvest.

The same growing conditions as jalapeño. What matters for chipotle is the drying environment rather than the growing one.

Smoke-drying chillies is a Mesoamerican technique documented well before European contact, and chipotle is its best-known survivor. The word comes from Nahuatl — chilpoctli, smoked chilli — which places both the product and the practice firmly before the colonial period.

A premium product relative to fresh jalapeño: it needs weeks of extra ripening, days of smoking and roughly ten kilos of fresh fruit per kilo of finished chilli. Its international spread is recent and largely driven by American adoption of the flavour rather than of the ingredient.