Poblano varieties for drying?

[oxbowfarm]

We already grow poblanos on a small scale for market, maybe 25 to 50 row feet the last few years. There is a small but consistent demand for fresh poblano peppers at my market, even though I'd say customers in this area are hot pepper averse, even the customers that think they aren't.

But as I'm trying to figure out a homestead food system, I'm more and more trying to create a homestead spice/flavor supply, and I'm really interested in the very extensive use of dried peppers in Mexican cuisine. From what I can tell from the Mexican cookbooks I have, dried peppers are a constant part of typical Mexican cuisine as a purposeful ingredient vs something to have when there aren't fresh peppers.

For a fresh hot chile, I love Mosco, but it is pretty much a pepper I like to use fresh roasted or roasted and frozen. I have not gone much into drying peppers for powder or flakes or as whole dried.

We dry herbs on a small farm scale, and I have a dedicated hoophouse drying system, so it would be simple thing for me to include some peppers in amongst the herbs.

The question I have is there are now a huge number of named varieties of Poblano/Ancho type peppers out there in the US seed market, but not much information on which ones are suitable for drying. In my experience, the more common hybrid types like Tiburon or Mosquetero are productive, but they tend to behave like a green bell, and produce a lot of green fruit that doesn't ripen very quickly at all, although that may be a factor of management and the harvest schedule we use.

I'm looking for any recommendations for drying type poblano class peppers, for making ancho rojo or mulato dried chiles.

[steev]

"Ancho Rojo"; very interesting concept; I suppose all the ancho chiles I've seen were dried green(black?); given that I tend to prefer mature chiles, I'm wondering WTF.

[oxbowfarm]

I didn't consider it a concept? My basic understanding of ancho chiles is that there are red ripe poblanos and brown ripe poblanos and the dried peppers are ancho or mulato depending on this. But nailing down how the dried chile industry works in Mexico is somewhat unclear to me so far. Its clear to me that lots of "poblano" varieties common in the US seed companies are selected for fresh market use, similar to jalapeños, which are mostly for fresh use in the US, and almost certainly are different than the jalapeño varieties that get smoked and dried for chipotles in Mexico. I'm interested in finding out if any of the strains kicking around are drying strains or not. There's also conflicting information in the Mexican cookbooks I have, some of which are written by Mexican authors and/or folks living and cooking in Mexico, and the chile enthusiast websites that pop up when you do a google search on things like "ancho vs mulato chile".

[jondear]

I've got some f2s and f3s segregating populations of poblano x jalapeño that throws early and bright red fruit if you're interested. You'll have to determine if they're good for sun drying, but in a dehydrater they dry fine.

[steev]

Again; very interesting; one wonders how much scholarly input has gone into these relatively "landrace" crops in Mexico; we're talking about crops used/developed over millenia by peasants, whose concern was only feeding themselves; lazy bastards.

I think you're dealing with a class of "culinary tourists" who don't know shit from apple-butter and a group of "experts" who aren't interested (seeing no grant money).

I wish you the best of luck, your quest being so very worthy.

[oxbowfarm]

Did a little internet hunting, not a lot of solid information but I did find this interesting booze blog post with lots of good images of at least one Mexican ancho drying system, which seems to show a red ripening type variety that is getting dried down en masse with the majority of the peppers still in the green to breaker stage vs all of them being fully ripe. I've tried a few times to germinate ancho seeds from imported Mexican anchos and I've never had any success. That kind of meshes with these pictures where the likelihood of many of the sees being mature seems lowered by the unripe state of most of them.