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Over in the events forum, Hammond mentioned that he received a gift of chiles de árbol from the Maxwell Street chile guy. That thread has devolved into a recipe discussion, but I’m putting my response over here in Shopping and Cooking where it belongs!



Chiles de árbol (usually toasted?) seem to be especially well suited as a condiment, added to taste to increase the heat level, as Hammond did with fried chiles in his lunch today. Antonius and I have had them this way in a couple places we’ve posted about, with the carne en su jugo at Taquería Tayahua, and with the birria at Reyes de Ocotlán. These chiles are also the basis for some of the bottled salsas, such as the one which tortas ahogadas are drenched in. I have a recipe for making that kind of salsa (start with 70 chiles de árbol), but really, is it worth the trouble when you can buy a good product in the stores?

We’ve enjoyed a nice salsa with tomatillos and chiles de árbol made by friends of ours from the state of Guanajuato; I’ve also had this at Mi Cafetal, which is run by a couple from Leon, Guanajuato. (The salsa is surely more widespread than just in Guanajuato, though.)

Patricia Quintana, in The Taste of Mexico, has a simple recipe for such a salsa:

30 tiny tomatillos, husked and roasted
4 cloves garlic, roasted
2 cloves garlic, whole
Salt to taste
4-6 chiles de árbol, fried
¼ c white onion, chopped

I’ll paraphrase her instructions: the tomatillos get ground up in a molcajete with both types of garlic. Add salt. Add chiles and grind again. Put in enough water to make a sauce, adjust the salt, and finally stir in the onions.

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Either in a salsa or toasted and crumbled over food, these chiles are a great way to increase the heat level for one or two diners when others at the table prefer blander food. A situation we know well in our own family, in fact.

Amata,

Toasting does seem like it's probably the more usual way to do it, but I was intrigued by A's suggestion of frying in olive oil.

That salsa recipe you posted sounds just right, though I'm tempted to double the chilies.

In addition to adding needed taste/heat to some regular dishes, the arbols are also kind of pretty to look at sitting in a bowl, all red and spidery (I've got so many of them, I'm starting to look upon them as a decorative as well as a culinary element in the kitchen).

Hammond

DH:

A vivid memory I have from childhood is of the strings of little dried red chiles that festooned the 'cold room', a fairly sizeable room which served as pantry in the basement (where all the real cooking took place) of my grandparents' house. They were strung all the way around the room, up on the walls just below the ceiling as I remember it -- I think there were also some strings that hung down as well. All in all, they usually had a lot of chiles on hand.

The pantry, aside from being usually filled with smells of wonderful things cooking, also had a permanent festive atmosphere for me as a kid, in large part on account of the red chiles, which seemed to me then to be first and foremost a sort of Christmas decoration.

Buon Natale,*
A

* How many days of shopping are left?

There's probably a whole thread's worth of memories of basement kitchens, my grandparents had one too that was more impressive than their upstairs one and was where all the summer cooking and canning took place.

I interviewed a Melrose Park official once about their housing court, which apparently is kept quite busy with illegal conversion cases of newly immigrated Mexicans living in basements and being passed off as family by the upstairs residents, a situation made tenable by the summer kitchens installed by many of the original Italian owners. My ability to get so much information out of him (in a town of notoriously close-mouthed public officials) was in part due to the rapport we developed talking about our memories of summer kitchens.