Cooking With Dried Chiles, Part 1

John Linn

From left to right: Ancho, cascabel, and arbol chile powder made at home from dried chiles.

​A couple weeks ago, I asked readers if they had any suggestions on what to do with some dried, Mexican chiles I had purchased at a local grocery store. I bought a bag of cascabel chiles and a bag of ancho chiles, and was looking to make something fun with them. Our reader, Freakerdude, came through and offered this advice:

Chili is one recipe you can use them in. Take about 3 ancho, 3 pasilla, and 3 guajillos and remove the top and seeds. Hyrdate them by boiling lightly for a few minutes. Combine them in a blender. Strain the mixture through a fine screen into your pot of chili.

An awesome al pastor is my favorite recipe though. I always have 3 kinds of hand....ancho, chili de arbol, and guajillo. I also keep chipotle and pasillas on hand. I'll send you my al pastor recipe to check out.

I decided to run with Freaker's ideas for a Super Bowl gathering at my house last night. I made beef sirloin chili con carne with ancho, cascabel, arbol, and chipotle chiles. I also made an al pastor marinated, barbecued pork shoulder and a lamb leg with the same preparation. And, for the most part, each dish came out fantastic (the lamb didn't, exactly, but that's another story).

I'm going to start off recapping the weekend-long cooking session by talking about how I prepared the chiles for each dish.

The first thing I needed to do was transform these dried chiles into a usable product. I decided early on that I would be making chile powder out of each of the varieties. But I also wanted to hydrate some of them as Freakerdude suggested.

John Linn

Seeding cascabel chiles over a bowl. Watch for seeds trying to escape all over your kitchen.

​I began by seeding and stemming the whole chiles. I set up four large bowls and got to work -- one bowl was to discard the stems and seeds into, and each of the other three bowls were to hold the three dried chiles I was working with. To recap, I used ancho, or dried poblanos, which are nutty, fruity, and chocolaty; cascabel, which are also quite chocolaty, but with slightly more heat; and arbol, which are fiery little red chiles of death that are toasty and quite hot.

Seeding a chile is relatively easy: you simply cut the chile open with kitchen shears (or your hands) and shake out the seeds. With the arbols, this process is the easiest, because the pods are long and you can rub the sides to easily loosen the seesd. But it's also the most time consuming, because the arbols are small and it takes more to make enough powder. I found it most difficult to remove the seeds from the anchos, because they tended to cling to the sticky walls of the pepper.  

Seeds removed, it's time to convert your dried peppers into powder or puree via hydrating.