This is a food rant. My first experiences with “real” cooking (you know, the kinds that don’t involve a microwave or pre-packaged stuff) were in a kitchen in Mexico. It’s where I learned to make arroz con leche, real pico de gallo, and arroz con frijoles. I learned how to make tortillas there–and actually, I learned to roll them out and make them perfectly rounded all by hand. Mexican cuisine is the only ethnic cuisine that I would say I know really well.
It seems that the current trend in food marketing is to call all things Tex Mex ‘chipotle’. Chipotle burritos, chipotle tacos, chipotle salsa, chipotle this and chipotle that. This would be just fine with me if the world suddenly discovered the chipotle pepper, fell in love with it, and now everything has chipotle in it. But my friends, chipotle is overused in the food world and just because it says chipotle on the label, doesn’t mean it really is.
Take for example, an unnamed salsa that I recently found labeled chipotle because it’s from the “Chipotle region” in Mexico. Huh? I challenge any of my readers to find me this so called “Chipotle region.” If you do, I’ll stand corrected but to my knowledge, (and dare I say that I’ve been to Mexico several times and as a Spanish major in college, I know my Mexican geography pretty well) there is no region of Mexico specifically named Chipotle. But maybe the salsa manufacturer meant to say that it was salsa from the region where chipotle chilies are processed. But again, being from a region where chilies are grown (you know, as opposed to the places where they are not grown) does not a chipotle salsa make.
So what makes something chipotle? Chipotle chilies. The dish can be called a chipotle whatever–cream, sauce, salsa–when it has chipotle chilies in it. You cannot call it chipotle and stick jalapenos in it. Although chipotle chilies are essentially dried up and smoked jalapenos–the flavor is distinctly different and it’s not chipotle with jalapenos. It’s jalapeno.
So there it is. My food rant. If we ever hope to leave the dirge of prepackaged foods behind us, we have to know our food. Look later for an actual, real, honest to goodness recipe using chipotle chilies.