Adding zest to vanilla ice cream was not tops in the minds of the first New Mexicans to raise chile peppers, back in the 1800s, but it’s very much on Lisa McKee’s agenda today. The professor of food science at New Mexico State University and one of her graduate students, Sarah Padilla, are holding a blind taste test of chile gelato. If it works, Ms. Padilla will take it to a national competition, with potential commercialization as a reward.
But first she needs to figure out which ground-up chile pepper mixes best with ice cream. She and Ms. McKee are inviting visitors to compare three. “We’ve got New Mexico Heritage 6-4, which is a very mild chile; cayenne, which is medium; and bhut jolokia, which is the hottest chile in the world,” says Ms. Padilla.
Those aren’t just casual opinions. The Scoville heat scale, which puts a number on mouth burn, clocks Heritage 6-4 at 3,000, which is virtually nothing. Cayenne scores 50,000, and bhut jolokia tops 1.1 million. What’s hotter than jolokia? Police pepper spray.
“It’s blow-your-head-off hot,” says Ms. McKee, “although I had two people yesterday who had the bhut jolokia ice cream and said, ‘Hey, this is really good.’ It’s making my eyeballs fall out of my head, and they’re just scooping it up. So it depends on the person.”
And chile peppers, in large part, depend on New Mexico State University. The state industry is worth $300-million to $500-million per year. And the land-grant college supports it with breeding programs (the very first cultivated chiles in the United States came from here), an extension service that supports the growers and processors, economists who crunch crop numbers, engineers who design harvesting equipment, and the Chile Pepper Institute, a research, education, and fund-raising facility.
The chile transcends a simple commodity label, however. “It’s integrated into our ceramics, clothing, our advertising,” says Paul W. Bosland, a professor of plant and environmental sciences and director of the institute. “Everybody has a ristra, a string of red chiles, by the front door to bring them good luck.”
But now this signature crop is doing a vanishing act.
“Here’s the problem,” says Terry L. Crawford, a professor of agricultural economics, pulling out two graphs and slapping them down on his desk. “Everyone wants to eat chiles now, but we’re producing fewer than ever.” One graph shows a line, climbing steeply upward, that tracks estimated U.S. chile consumption. It goes from about 700,000 metric tons in 1995 to more than 1.6 million in 2006 and beyond. The other graph shows harvested chile acreage in New Mexico. It drops from nearly 30,000 acres in 1990 to about 8,700 last year.
What’s in the middle, between production and consumption? “Imports,” says Mr. Crawford. “Chiles are being grown and processed in Asia, in India, and Mexico, and their labor costs are a fraction of ours.”
Chiles in New Mexico come in five basic types and are used in different ways. Standing in the middle of a garden containing more than 50 different varieties of the basic five, Mr. Bosland leans down and picks up a green one. Green chiles need to be fleshy and firm, and they get roasted and sliced and used in chile sauce. Red chiles are riper, more mature versions, but they are bred to have thinner skins because they get dehydrated and used to make chile powder. Paprika is a type of red chile bred to have very little flavor but lots of color. “It’s used as a food-coloring agent,” Mr. Bosland says. “They feed it to farmed salmon to get the meat red, and to chickens to get the yolks more orange. It’s where the red comes from on your BBQ potato chips.” Then there’s cayenne, a pungent red variety that gets made into a mash, much of which is shipped to places like Louisiana and made into hot sauce. (“What, you thought they had the land to grow it down there?” Mr. Crawford asks, chuckling.)
And there are jalapeños, small, dark, and green, with noticeable heat. They score up to 8,000 on the Scoville scale, although Mr. Bosland won an IgNobel Prize in 1999 for breeding a spiceless version.
There is a method behind that apparent madness: to sell more New Mexican peppers. Food companies make mild salsas by diluting hot jalapeños with sweet bell peppers—non-New-Mexican bell peppers. But if they can get mild jalapeños from New Mexico, it’s one-stop shopping and a boost for the state industry.
Mr. Bosland is not the first New Mexico faculty member to dull down a chile for the market. The garden he’s standing in once belonged to Fabián García, a member of the university’s first graduating class, in 1894, who went on to direct its extension service.
“García realized that Hispanics, but not whites, were growing chiles,” Mr. Bosland says. “He thought if he made [the chiles] more uniform and a little milder, he could get Anglos to eat them. So he crossed three pod types: two black ones and a red one. Then, in the early 1900s, he released something called New Mexico Number 9. Farmers liked it, non-Hispanics liked it, and it took off from there.” His old research farm, which now holds Mr. Bosland’s garden and experimental greenhouses, is called the Fabián García Science Center.
The chiles bred there are not just designed for less heat, Mr. Bosland is quick to say. “We’re also trying to put flavor in.” Flavor in a chile is hard to define. It’s like listening to an aficionado talk about wine: Piquant. Rich. Sharp. Full. “Chiles are like wine grapes,” says Mr. Bosland. “Where you grow them affects the flavor.” The French have known this for a long time. They call it terroir. Chiles from Chimayo, in the northern half of the state, taste different from those grown in Hatch—pretty much the state’s chile-pepper capital—in the south.
And Hatch chiles certainly taste different from those grown in Arizona. This summer, in fact, a New Mexico law went into effect making it illegal to label anything a Hatch chile unless it was grown in that town. “We’re becoming like Bordeaux,” says Barbara Couture, the university’s president, invoking French winemakers again. “Now chile varieties are getting established with our city designations.”
Labels may help with marketing, but they won’t solve the chile problem that, if Wilbur Scoville had invented an economic heat scale, would top one million: harvesting. Stephanie Walker, an assistant professor of plant sciences in New Mexico State’s extension service, says, “The reason we’re getting beat by imports is that harvesting is very labor intensive.” For green chiles it’s done by hand, and, she adds, there are not a lot of hands to go around. Growers have crops in the field but can’t find field hands to pick them.
And using harvesting machines to substitute for people is not a simple fix. The peppers have to meet the machines halfway. Plants that grow too tall, or that set their fruit in the middle of the plant rather than the outside edges, get butchered by blades. So Ms. Walker works with Mr. Bosland on breeding plants that hang fruits on the outside. “We’ve made real progress there,” she says. “But we still have the stem problem.”
Machines grab the fruit stem and all, but the woody appendage is about as edible as a twig, and that’s a safety concern, Ms. Walker says. Stems also ruin fermentation when they get into chile mash.
The solution, maybe, is being developed in a cavernous machine shop at the university’s Manufacturing Technology and Engineering Center. There an engineer, Ryan Herbon, has put together something the size of a tractor-trailer. It starts with a hopper filled with chiles, shakes them to separate them, guides them into narrow channels to ensure they are oriented the same way, and runs them beneath a computerized scanner, which identifies the stems, and then under needle-thin jets of water, which, at 4,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, slice the stems off. “I can get within a sixteenth of an inch” Mr. Herbon says, meaning that’s all the fruit he’ll nick when the stem comes off. The machine is being field-tested this fall.
That gives Mr. Bosland some hope for the future of the New Mexico chile. The demand is certainly there. “When I started, in 1986, people asked me if chiles were a trend or a fad,” he says. “Nobody asks me that anymore. We’re becoming a fiery-food-eating nation.”
