Peppers · Dried Anaheim

California

Light and bright, with notes of golden raisin and red pepper, in Milk Street’s description of the dried pod.

Scoville heat units

500 to 2,500 SHU, per Wikipedia (Anaheim pepper). Spices Inc. rates its Anaheim chile powder at 500 to 1,000, and Dave DeWitt’s scale puts canned green chiles at 100 to 500. Log scale against the hottest chile in this guide.

The Anaheim is the long green chile of New Mexico as it came to be grown in California. Picked green, it is roasted and canned. Ripened and dried, it is sold as the California chile and ground into California chili powder, a fixture of California competition chili.

The Chile Pepper Institute classes Anaheim as a cultivar of the New Mexican pod type, and NMSU’s Paul Bosland writes that its seed came from New Mexico to Anaheim, California, where it was widely grown. Fiery Foods' glossary calls Anaheim the name the California produce industry gave the New Mexican type. The Institute also notes that true New Mexican chiles are sometimes mislabeled Anaheim.

Emilio Ortega is credited with bringing the chile to California. The Ortega company’s account, reprinted by Dave DeWitt, says he took up chiles in New Mexico in 1890 and later grew them at his family’s adobe in Ventura, where he roasted and peeled the green pods and packed them in cans. The Museum of Ventura County calls the work begun in that adobe what is believed to be the first commercial food operation of its kind in California.

Left on the plant, the pods ripen red. Dried, they are sold as California chiles, which Milk Street describes as the ripe form of the green Anaheim, and ground into a mild powder. Spices Inc. notes that California-grown Anaheims dry to a darker red than Hatch chiles.

California

Sources