Earlier this year the Denver alternative weekly, Westwood published a restaurant review 1 and a follow-up article 2 about Denver's obsession with green chili. The articles described the surprisingly prominent place that green chili holds in Colorado cooking. It was news to me. But after thinking about it, I realized I had – in fact – overlooked a series of uniquely Colorado capsaicin clues – clues that should have alerted me to the regional importance of green chili in Colorado. See what you think:

Clue 1. I myself like green chili a lot... and I live in Colorado, north of Denver.

Clue 2. I especially like and enthusiastically recommend the green chili at Los Tarascos Mexican restaurant on College Avenue in Fort Collins (despite the culinary inconvenience of the owners of Los Tarascos coming from a southern Mexican state, which is far removed from the northern Mexican states and American southwest where green chili originated).

Clue 3. My acquaintance Jaqui makes an hallucinatorily great green chili, which she learned how to cook in her hometown of Pueblo, Colorado – two hours south of Denver.

Clue 4. Pueblo is also the hometown of the Pueblo green chile, which is Pueblo's secret weapon in producing the best green chili in Colorado. At least, that's what Jaqui says (and which the Westwood follow-up article confirms).

Clue 5. The Pueblo green chile is also known as the mira sol chile (or mirasol chile) because the mira sol plant holds its chile fruit upright on the stem and "looking at the sun", rather than hanging down. The mira sol chile has been grown in the Pueblo area of the Arkansas River valley since at least 1910. It surely qualifies as a locally conserved and appreciated heirloom variety of Capsicum annuum.

Clue 6. According to a geographer who's affiliated with the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs – someone who's an expert on Hispanization in the U.S. – The Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival, which has been held in Pueblo in late September since 1994, "coincides with the Denver Broncos football season, and the Pueblo Chamber has successfully wedded these two seasonal events. Chiles are roasted and taken home to be eaten during the game in chile verde, chile rellenos, and guacamole. Fall in Pueblo, and increasingly in Colorado, means football and green chiles." 3

Clue 7. And lastly, Dr. Mike Bartolo initiated a mira sol breeding program at the Arkansas Valley Research Center in Rocky Ford, Colorado. Mike's program developed the Mosco variety of the mira sol chile, which the Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station released for commercial production in 2005.4 The Mosco variety is now grown on over 50% of the acreage that had previously been planted to older varieties of the mira sol chile.

So there you have it. Green chile peppers go back 100 years in Colorado, but green chili stew presents a more recent history – one that's benefited from a lot push from the chili's contemporary friends. Which irks some, as you can read about here.5

Green chili in Denver is known for its slurry consistency. Jaqui's green chili is less viscous than that and has a fuller flavor. My own green chili – which I describe below – comes from a cookbook 6 (more or less). The juniper berries are key to my chili's success, as are the freshly roasted poblano chiles, which I buy from the farmer's market. I'd buy mira sols, but they're not distributed this far north.

Ingredients
2 pound diced pork ($1.99 per pound, on sale)
1 large red onion, coarsely chopped
3 clove garlic, finely chopped
¾ teaspoon juniper berries, crushed in a mortar and pestle
2 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
2 cup chicken broth (2 cup water + 1 scant teaspoon of Superior Touch® brand Better Than Bouillon chicken base)
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoon flour
6 roasted poblano chile ($5.00 per ¾ pound from the farmer's market)

Procedure
Sauté the onion in the olive oil in a Dutch Oven until translucent. Add the garlic and juniper berries, and continue to sauté for another minute or so. Add the pork. Cook until no longer pink, and then simmer for 10 minutes.

Prepare the chicken broth. Whisk in the salt and pepper, and add the broth to the pork. Simmer for 20-30 minutes.

Ladle a cup or more of the broth into a bowl. Whisk in the flour, and then slowly add back to the pork. Add the chiles. Simmer for another 20-30 minutes.

I serve this chile garnished with tomato salsa and/or corn salsa and sometimes over rice.


1Lori Midson (15-Apr-11), Denver's five best green chile fixes, Westwood, Cafe Society blog, online at blogs.westword.com/cafesociety.

2Patricia Calhoun (18-Apr-11), Readers: Is the best green chile in Pueblo? Or is it just hot snot? Westwood, Cafe Society blog, online at blogs.westword.com/cafesociety.

3Terrance W. Haverluk (2000), Chile peppers and identity construction in Pueblo, Colorado. Journal for the Study of Food and Society 6:45-59.

4Michael E. Bartolo (undated), The Mosco chile pepper: Notice of release of Mosco pepper, Denver Green Chili website, online at denvergreenchili.com/moscochilepepper.aspx.

5Patricia Calhoun (27-Apr-11), Readers: There's no such thing as Colorado green chile! Westwood, Cafe Society blog, online at blogs.westword.com/cafesociety.

6Betty Crocker's Southwest Cooking (1989), Green chile stew, pages 74-75, Prentice Hall, New York.