{"id":27085,"date":"2019-10-16T08:00:06","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T14:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uchealth.org\/today\/?p=27085"},"modified":"2025-03-07T11:24:01","modified_gmt":"2025-03-07T18:24:01","slug":"cooking-with-fresh-chiles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uchealth.org\/today\/cooking-with-fresh-chiles\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooking with fresh chiles"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Fresh chiles add flavor to anything you’re making. Photo: Getty Images.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In our refrigerators and pantries, we let languish mustards and vinegars, salsas and pickles. Carrots grow beards; celery gets limp.<\/p>\n

But the greatest disservice, in my view, that we do to a foodstuff is how we treat and eventually ignore the chile pepper.<\/p>\n

Not an individual fresh one that we might buy\u2014not usually. By and large, that chile pepper is quickly dispatched (though rarely properly), intended for a specific purpose, for a given day and dinner. As a garnish, perhaps, or for a homemade salsa.<\/p>\n

No, first off, we buy the chile pepper in its worst forms: as hot sauce or chile powder \u2014 diverse and useful, yes, but frankly not its best showings \u2014 and both of which, in short order, we then let decline alongside its neighbors in the refrigerator, those now-forlorn pickles and mustards.<\/p>\n

But what worlds of flavor fresh chile peppers can bring us, nearly always and for everything. If only we better honored them, knew their many and diverse secrets, understood how best to reveal those. Even ate them every day.<\/p>\n

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Here’s a “VIT” or very important tip. Use gloves when you’re cooking with fresh chiles. Here, Bill St. John demonstrates how to scrape the seeds from the inside of a charred, fresh chile. Photo courtesy of Bill St. John.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I cannot tell you here about the chile pepper in its measureless entirety, about the long or short ones, the fat and thin ones, those in red, yellow, green, purple, even brown, all which colors may revise in a particular chile when dried.<\/p>\n

And how to describe to (or warn?) you of their levels of heat? Because even, say, a short stout green one advertised to be \u201cmoderately hot\u201d may, from one plant to the other\u2014indeed from one stem on the same plant to the other! \u2014 contain in itself a wickedly dangerous fire.<\/p>\n

All I can do here, in this small space, is invite and encourage you to bring more of the chile pepper into your home and onto your kitchen counter. Discover how much it can give to your cooking (your preserving, your snacking, your entertaining).<\/p>\n

Here are some tips for unlocking their secrets:<\/p>\n