Ingredients · Spice

Chipotle

Capsicum annuum · Solanaceae (nightshade family)

Chipotle
A smoke-dried jalapeño, and the name says exactly that — from Nahuatl chīlpoctli, smoked chile. Smoke first, then a slow rounded heat, with a sweet fruitiness underneath. Three products carry it. The reason it exists is practical: a jalapeño is thick-walled and wet, and smoke dries what the sun cannot. Red, ripe jalapeños are smoked for about six days at 65 to 75°C, mostly over pecan wood, and ten pounds of fresh chiles make one pound of chipotles.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromMexico
TasteSmoke first, then a slow rounded heat; sweet and fruity underneath

How to use it

In adobo, salsas, marinades and slow-cooked dishes. Chipotle mayo. In chili, pulled pork, black bean soup and sweet potato. The powder carries the smoke further than you expect, so start small. It pairs unusually well with sweetness — honey, maple, chocolate.

With food

Pork and beef. Black beans. Sweet potato and squash. Chocolate. Honey and maple. Lime. Sour cream. Corn.

With spices

Cumin and Mexican oregano. Garlic and onion. Ancho and guajillo. Smoked paprika, for more of the same. Cinnamon.

With tea

Not a tea ingredient, though Lapsang Souchong meets it smoke for smoke.

Its story

Where it comes from

Mexican. The morita type — darker, red-purple, grown mainly in Chihuahua — is the one most common in the United States; the larger, grey-tan meco is preferred within Mexico. Camargo in Chihuahua has a whole industrial park of open-air smoking kilns. Our lot names no origin or type.

What happened

Smoke-drying chiles in Mesoamerica predates the Aztecs. Sahagún's Florentine Codex — completed at Tlatelolco in 1577, written in parallel columns of Nahuatl and Spanish with nearly 2,500 images, and made in partnership with Nahua elders and his former students — has a chile seller in the markets of the Triple Alliance selling chile ahumado, smoked chile, alongside small chiles, tree chiles and thin chiles. That record exists because a Franciscan friar and his Nahua collaborators set down a world the conquest had overturned. A small piece of kinship worth noting: pecan is a hickory, so the smoke in a chipotle is cousin to the smoke in a Southern barbecue.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

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