Hatch Chili Season!! Cue the Roasted Salsa!

Just in case you missed the headlines…….it’s Hatch Chili season! Hatch Chili’s come from New Mexico’s Hatch Valley. They have grown in popularity over the years so much so that a lot of grocery stores have events where you can buy your Hatch Chili’s freshly roasted.

They set up the greatest roaster and roast them in less time than you could do them at home. My brother and I have done some hatch chilis for a few years.   This year we bought the freshly roasted ones from our local Gelsons market. Talk about a game changer……it saved us so much time. I will ALWAYS buy them this way in the future.

Here’s a picture of the roaster that you’ll see in the parking lots where it’s offered during the season. It’s amazing…..it turns for several minutes until the skins are nice and toasted then they dump them back into a plastic bag and back to the box for you to take home. We didn’t have to wait any longer than the 15-minute trip home to start peeling them.

We did a case this year, yep 25 lbs! Towards the end, it got a little overwhelming (ok, maybe a lot overwhelming) but when we go to use them in the fall/winter we’ll be overjoyed with our efforts.

My NUMBER 1 piece of advice for this project is to invest in food-safe gloves. This is the first year we did the “hot” chilis and I’ll tell you…..Oh My Goodness…..towards the end, my fingers were on fire. And that fire lasted into the next day. (Although I will say the tip we found on the Internet to douse our hands in olive oil for a few minutes then wash with dish soap several times helped improve the fire immensely.)

It’s a pretty labor-intensive project. You pull a few chilis out and one by one peel back the skins.

Then you have to cut the tops off; we had so many we cut a little further down so that a lot of the seeds were pulled away with what we tossed out. Then we cut them open and removed the last of the seeds. At this point, you can make so many different things with them. We made salsa and a chile verde sauce.

Today I’m sharing the Salsa recipe that we literally threw together by looking at various salsa recipes and using what we had bought at the store. It’s super easy once you have the chili peppers peeled.

You roast the other ingredients in the oven while you are peeling the Hatch Chilis and you blend them all together.  Don’t these just look amazing coming from the oven?

Simple Roasting of the ingredients

The flavor has a depth because of the smokiness of the chili’s and the tomatoes add both great color and a burst of flavor.

Serve it with your favorite tortilla chips! Or make it a meal and serve it over your favorite meat! The chilis would also be great used in our Green Chili Au Gratin Potatoes!

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