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| Hatch chiles |
The above picture is from a couple of years ago when we roasted some in the oven. This is what they look like before roasting. You can click HERE for all that excitement.
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| Fire roasted Hatch chiles |
This year, we opted to go a bit easier. They sell them already roasted, and better yet, they are fire roasted (we did ours in the oven). It was certainly more time saving. We probably paid a bit more but it was worth it.
The first thing we I did was get the skins off. When they are roasted, the skins form an almost plastic like coating. It's hard to describe but the good thing is running them under some water and rubbing, they just slip right off.
We dried them off and separated them into roughly equal packages. We also decided to split them open and flatten them out. We don't use them stuffed, we use them just chopped up as an additional ingredient in cooking so this makes it easier to add them later.
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| Vacuum sealed Hatch chiles |
Lastly, we used our vacuum sealer to put them into flat packages and popped them in the freezer. We did four batches like this so we ended up with twelve bags. Since Hatch chiles are pretty much only available once a year, I guess we can only use one a month until they come around next season!
Anyone have any good uses for Hatch Chiles?
Got 25 lbs roasted recently and did what you've done for the freezer with half of them. The other half went into the dehydrator flattened & deseeded. Ground them into fabulous Hatch chili powder. Used some in an apple crisp and some in (gasp) peanut butter cookies. Perhaps we should all move to New Mexico...
ReplyDeleteSandy
my grocer roasts them outside in a wire basket over wood. when you get there, you pick out what you want and then go shopping. you stop and pick up the roasted peppers on the way out. so cool. i used mine in an omelet.
ReplyDeleteLast year we bought 30 pounds and ran out before we could get them again. This year we bought 50 pounds. I froze most of them and dehydrated the rest and made chili powder. It is amazing chili powder. Yum!
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