I've been discovering many different peppers, lately.

A lentil soup recipe I got from NPR required both Ancho and Chipotle 
peppers.

Ancho's are dried Poblanos.  The People's Food Coop has them for around
$22/lb, or about $1.43 each.  Wow.

Ancho's puff up like crazy in the oven at 350 F for five minutes.  We
roasted them that way, then rehydrated them.  

Chipotle's are the most interesting pepper I've ever come across.  These
are smoked jalapenos.  The recipe required a puree of Chipotle's in Adobo
sauce.  Adobo sauce is Chipotle based.

Zingerman's had dried Chipotles and Adobo sauce, but no Chipotles *in*
Adobo sauce.  So I bought both, rehydraded the Chiles, and pureed them 
in the sauce. 

The best part was adding the chile-rehydration-water to the soup stock.
The soup came out intensely smokey and wonderful.
 
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It was recommended that I obtain chiles from Whole Foods.

Where do you go, what do you buy, what do you like, and why?

7 responses total.

I'm hoping this item gets some attention as I know very little
about cooking with hot peppers.  I think I'm being exotic when I
open a little can of chopped green peppers to make enchiladas.

John brought back a couple of cookbooks from Santa Fe both
offering recipes requiring a pretty good understanding of
different peppers.  One deals only with salsas, the other
is _Hot, Spicy and Meatless_.  I guess I'd like to try the
spicy but not so hot ones but don't know how to tell from the
recipe which is which.

I have found that dried peppers vary considerably, and that they lose
potency with time.  I suspect the very best solution would be to fly to
texas, buy them from the farmer, fly back, and pop them straight into
the freezer.  In actuality, though, I buy mine at PFC, a little at a
time.  Since PFC sells in bulk at reasonable prices, this works out
pretty good.  Whole Foods probably also sells in bulk, and they're
likely to have a larger selection & reasonable turn-over, so if you
don't care about helping PFC out they should be a reasonable deal.

The PFC actually recommended Whole Foods to me when they didn't have
the particular pepper I was looking for.  Wow!  Reminds me of Macy's
and Gimbel's in the original "Miracle on 34th Street."

Actually, my experience has been that employees of many stores are quick
to suggest other stores when I ask for things they don't carry.

(I'm looking over some old items :) )
allrecipes.com used to have a page on chile peppers.

To be honest, I don't think I've cooked with anything beyond jalapenos 
or serranos.  When it's jalapenos, I try to find a good price, and I 
think that's going somewhere that will buy local when possible.  I 
think jalapenos are grown in the Yakima Valley during the summer 
season, and prices tend to be better around then.  I'm not sure I 
single out a particular grocery store if it's not the usual one we go 
to.

One of my regular dishes with jalapenos/serranos was some kind of pork 
roast cooked in my pressure cooker-- I'd just add some crushed 
pineapple and some diced jalapenos.

I've also been fond of making chili with fresh jalapenos.  

You can freeze peppers easily in plastic bags, after removing the stems and
seeds.  Or dry them in a fruit dryer (or if you have hot dry weather in theory
you can just string them and they will dry themselves).

(wow, how odd to see Mary still as Chelsea :)

We got the Chili en Adobo from Kroger. :)  Lately we've been making
pilgramages down to Mexican town for supplies too, as we've been completely
hooked on Mexican food ever since we were in Santa Fe last year.  Got some
great dried Ancho chili powder down there.

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