for the last 3 falls i have smoked and dried some jals for chipotle and they always come out quite smokey. i was sort of wishing they would be a bit less smokey. i try to keep my temps around 105 and do this for 10 or 12 hours using pecan wood, and then finish with the dehydrator. i'm sorry to say i have used all the pecan up---boooo

anyway, since you have been in mexico watching the folks make chipole, i was hoping you could tell me whether they had a large amount of smoke,. or was it just a trickle?

any other hints or clues would be nice also. thanks---bob

While smoke preserves them, so does the drying. The smoke isn't necessary to preserve them, so smoke to your taste.

Apple wood works really well for smoking if you happen to have any apple trees that need pruning.

Smoke temperature is controlled by pouring water on the flue pipe, not by decreasing the rate of combustion.

@oregonwoodsmoke--
i'm hoping to do 2 batches this fall and
one i'm going to use debarked fresh alder and the other
i am going to use apple....what about cherry, got any
ideas on it or have you ever used it to smoke

@ willard--
i remember your post from last year and thats why
i called you out because you are the only one who i have
ever seen the actual process. i've asked all my mexican friends and none have ever witnessed before,but all want my
chipotles for sure. last year i had a wood stove
connected with maybe 8 feet of stove pipe to the smoke
chamber. possibly this year i will shorten the length of
the pipe, run a hotter fire, and cool the pipe down
with a slow flow of water. thanks so much for the info.

what time of year were they smoking chipotle?

for many
year i would hang out in san blas, nayarit a few months
each year, but its been a while and before i started
growing peppers, and before getting married.
my wifes kids are out of school now
and so i'm hoping to start going back down. i will
definitely be hitting up some of my old friends to see
what and who they may know about chipotles
thanks for all the info you help us out with on this forum
by the way. who knows, maybe meet ya in mexico--adios

THANKS TO ALL OF YOU FOR YOUR REPLIES---TEXAS BOB

My favorite is apple. I also like oak quite well.

I don't like hickory at all. It tastes fishy to me and often has a menthol taste to it.

I've never smoked with alder, so don't have an opinion. If you like it for barbecuing meats, you will like it for chilies.

I'll be trying pear next spring since my pear trees are now big enough to give smoker size prunings.

John A, you can smoke any type of chilies you want to. I smoke poblanos. I would say that it is only the jalapenos that are called chipotle, but you can smoke any chili and it will be good.

Chili paste would be ground dried chilies mixed with enough water to make a paste. You'd have the best luck doing that with a mortar and pestle, unless you are making an enormous batch, when you would use a food processor (cooking for 300 people?)

I throw the dried pods whole, minus stems and seeds, into my pots of chili. For dishes that cook for less time, the chili is ground into chili powder.

I don't have any recipes that would require chili paste. Usually, there is ground power and liquid going into a recipe, so no real need to make paste before starting to cook. But if you want paste, it's easy to make.

I am assuming that they added the smoke flavor artificially.

Chipotle seems to be one of the things that has to be done at home if you want the real stuff.

I think the common misconception is that the Mexicans are smoking the chile because gringos smoke stuff. What they are really trying to do is dry the chiles to preserve them and the smoke is incidental to drying. Pueblos where many chiles are grown in Mexico frequently have no electricity/propane to dry stuff and use mesquite frequently to supply the heat.

I've made paste before but would rather use a molcajete to make powder for use in cooking. If you plan on doing any Mexican cooking, get a molcajete now, it solves a lot of problems.