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In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Green Chile and Balloon Rides Appeal to Taste and Adventure By Shirley Fong-Torres Shirley
would love to hear from you. Of all Wroburlto 's personalities, my bipolar bear is easiest to deal with when he thinks he's an American Indian holy man. At any rate, when he started telling me…about hot air balloon rides, river rafting and horseback excursions, I knew he was coaxing me into taking him on a "vision quest" to Albuquerque. I think I surprised him by quickly agreeing. Understand now, I was born without the thrill-seeking chromosome. So, normally, it would take a thousand draft horses, or a granddaughter smile, to drag me onto anything that glides, floats, gallops or in any way threatens my faithful marriage to terra firma. But none of Wro's Albuquerque adventures scared me because I had previously discovered that New Mexico casts a protective spell over both human and bear souls.
(Albuquerque's colorful Civic Plaza) The state's enchantments are legendary, and to a San Franciscan like me, they have the charm of time travel: You can actually park on the street, even downtown and particularly on weekends…You can cruise down Central Avenue, which is Route 66, the aorta of American wanderlust and nostalgia…You can even see the very balloons that inspired Jules Verne and H.G. Welles to make time travel a popular fantasy. The Town of the Twin War Chiefs Gigantic spirits lurk in the footsteps of legend. Albuquerque is the town of the twin war chiefs Mase'iwe and Uyuye'ewi, following the magic yellow light of Zia. It is the place of the wind-grieved aviators Ben Abruzzo and Maxie Anderson, adrift in the currents of eternity. It's home to Tingley's Beach and Pimentel guitars, the town where Fred Harvey and Conrad Hilton polished their first silverware, where Bill Gates and Paul Allen came to brainstorm the software industry, where Michael Todd touched down to create the modern epic movie, and where Jimmy Stewart escaped to keep it all real. A City Built of Holy Stones & Magic Feathers Albuquerque was built with holy stones and magic feathers to host sunsets that draw standing ovations and balloons that fly in a box which magically pulls them back. D.H. Lawrence said that light in New Mexico is more like that which left the sun. To a photographer's delight, the New Mexican altitude filters out some wave lengths, leaving our perception of colors enchanted. This magic light is the visible evidence of a spell that Wro calls the Zia Spirit. It is the blood brother of Aloha spirit. Like Hawaii, New Mexico is layered in cultures that remain intact, not assimilated like most of the American melting pot. For proud people came to both places, where sunny spirits nurture pride.
(There is no better way to visit Albuquerque than with a balloon ride) So, there is no better way to begin a visit to Albuquerque than with a balloon ride. While Wro was intrepid, Mommy needed to hear guide Brandon's assurances. "During the flight, you will feel hardly any motion. You will experience a peaceful serenity combined with the excitement of being among the clouds." I didn't even object to the word "excitement" riding in the same sentence with "peaceful serenity," as long as it wasn't riding in my gondola. Drifting Over a City of Neighborhoods The balloon drifts back and forth over this city of neighborhoods, demonstrating first hand the famous "Albuquerque Box" -- wind currents that change with the altitudes because of the mountain ranges surrounding the city. These allow balloons to navigate predictably…and reassuringly. Wro learned that hot air balloons are a morning thing, gas balloons are for the afternoon. That appealed to my sense of order, which asserts itself after the unbearable lightness of floating. Champagne breakfast comes with the ride at Beautiful Balloons, so it's a relatively stress-free introduction to the sport. Because of the unique geography that creates the "box," Albuquerque breaths the balloon culture, so much so that an annual balloon fiesta is the biggest tourism event of the year and "The Balloon Saloon, Gardunos on the Green," has stadium seating facing the balloon launching meadow. The city also built a full-fledged museum to the sport, just behind the saloon. The cloth-roofed Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum opened in late 2005 and anchors the city zeitgeist, for partnering "serenity" with "excitement." Albuquerque has long history with balloons. When President Taft came in 1909, at the time New Mexico was seeking statehood, a promotional zeppelin exploded, and organizers replaced it with a balloon. In 1978 Ben Abruzzo and Maxie Anderson, along with partner Larry Newman, completed the first-ever Atlantic crossing in a gas balloon. Both Anderson and Abruzzo would both later die in air crashes, and their families led city efforts to establish a memorial museum to balloon flight. The museum houses such things as gondolas from the first stratospheric flight, the first transcontinental flight and the first Pacific crossing. There are wicker baskets from 19th-century balloon history, World War I balloons and the parachute of Marie Merton, a Victorian lady who liked to jump out of balloons. Chiles and Albuquerque: The Perfect Match The balloons made Wro's soul soar, but they made me think of chile, the city's alter-logo and my main inspiration to visit Albuquerque. Chile is to New Mexico what pineapple is to Hawaii, an identifying food that never tastes as good anywhere else. Wro says it's the yellow light thing. I never dispute him when he's on a vision quest.
(Chile is very special in New Mexico) At any rate, chile is so special to New Mexico, it's even spelled differently here where the state Legislature declared "Red or Green?" the Official State Question. I kid you not. Each year, New Mexico produces 100,000 tons of chile peppers. New Mexico State University, which has a Chile Pepper Institute, has been developing special New Mexican chiles since 1889, on some 15,000 acres of chile fields in the legendary Mesilla (a.k.a. Hatch) Valley, where the Rio Grande River widens under the Organ Mountains. But chile is more than an agricultural or economic thing, it's a culture that brings together all the disparate elements of New Mexico -- Indian, Hispanic, European, Texan. Well, maybe not Texan, we'll get to that soon. Chile culture is ubiquitous in Albuquerque. The Golden Crown Bakery ships their signature green chile bread all over the world. The Candy Lady makes green chile truffles and chocolates that have a scandalous international reputation. Jane Butel built a TV and cookbook empire around the chile. Bueno Foods and El Pinto have done so in more substantial forms, the kind you put in your freezer or pantry. Green Chiles at the Tavern The tavern at the old Mine Shaft Museum offers green chile with vegan and Atkins accommodations. The High Noon restaurant and saloon in Old Town serves green chile with bison. Just as a balloon launched Wroburlto's vision quest, chile would be the vehicle for Mommy's food quest.
(Chile is a food with a god of its own, wrote food anthropologist Diana Kennedy) Food anthropologist Diana Kennedy wrote that chile is a food with a god of its own. But its nature fits evolutionary doctrine, too. Chile peppers became pan-American because migratory birds loved them and carried them from their wild Bolivian mother lode. Because the seeds ran through avian digestive tracts in tact, chilies quickly propagated north of their Andean birth place. They developed successfully in the wild because their heat frightened animals from eating them. Cattle drivers would cast seeds in the mesquite to harvest a year later. Like its nightshade cousin the tomato, chile was not accepted as food on Northern European or Euro-American tables until the latter part of the 18th century. Of course, New Mexicans had already been using them for a long while. At least since conquistador Don Juan de Oñate rode into Santa Fe in 1598 with a sack full of seeds. Those original seeds (traces) still exist, in an endangered way, but we'll talk about that after dinner, in the second part of this adventure. Following the Aroma of Roasting Green Chile: Bueno Foods First, we did what all good food writers must do, we followed the aroma of roasting green chile. Bueno Foods is a family business with deep ties to Barelas, the old Hispanic neighborhood of central Albuquerque. I could smell their factory half a mile away (Wro says it smells like enlightenment) because it was green chile season and the Bueno roasters were burning around the clock. Ana Baca is the youngest member of the current generation that runs the business and she explained the Bueno history.
(Ana Baca poses with Shirley and Wro) "My grandfather Refugio began the business as a grocery store in the 1940's," she said. "When the Piggly Wigglys and Safeways moved in the neighborhood stores couldn't compete, so they started selling grandma's home made foods for carryout. Then they began manufacturing tortillas on a pie crust roller and tamales and posole, too, and moved the operation around the corner from the grocery store to their child hood home. "Then the Big Idea came. My father and his brothers noticed that Birdseye frozen vegetables were becoming popular and that ordinary people were buying home freezers. Before then, green chilies were only eaten between August and October, the rest of the year there were only red chilies. They wanted to take this great New Mexican tradition of autumn and make it possible for people to enjoy green chile year around. "So they invented the flame roasting equipment and began developing the method for making green chilies on a commercial scale, as it had never been done before. Green chile made the company. It took 25 years to get to $1 million in annual sales, but then it really grew." Ana a Stanford Grad Ana, also a novelist and children's book author, is a Stanford grad, the dreaded rival of California bears like Wro. So it was fortunate that he was channeling the most magnanimous of all his personalities. Then again, it's nearly impossible not to warm to the Baca crede. "Our parents told all of us to use our lives to serve others," Ana explained. "My first sister became a social worker, the second a physician. Jackie was the third and she envisioned a way to make the company into a community service, by growing jobs for the neighborhood. In 1982 she put together the financing package to build this plant." Jackie Baca insisted the plant remain in Barelas, providing jobs where they best served the community. She was vice president then, at 29. Three years later, her Dad died, and she became one of the youngest female CEO's in history. Her brother Gene, a lawyer, joined the company then, too. "Dad's spirit is the sixth child in the family," said Ana. "Catherine, the physician, came into the business, to focus on health aspects of food and of our people. We now have 150 authentic New Mexican and Mexican food products, and a new natural and organic foods line (Buenatural). We try to keep things as natural and indigenous as possible in mechanization." Bueno's mechanical metates are the only ones in the American tortilla and corn meal industry that use volcanic rock to grind corn, just as the Aztecs did. As a result, they have to re-groove these stones every 14 days, as the hard corn corrodes them. "We buy millions and millions of pounds of chile a year," Ana noted. "Our competitors encourage farmers to go for (high) yield. We ask them for flavor. We found that certified New Mexican cultivars have it. We don't use the (milder) Anaheims." Bueno is particular about when the chile is harvested too. "New Mexicans think that authentic green chile is deeply roasted and has a little bit of red in it," Ana said. Wro, who was pondering the "hidden meaning" of New Mexico's Official State Question, decided that Ana was on to another Big Idea, something deep and relevant to his vision quest. A Visit to the Jane Butel's Cooking School Next we visited the Jane Butel Cooking School, to take a class from the TV chef and author of 16 cookbooks on Southwestern cooking. Ms. Butel's classes range from the weeklong to the single session and are held in La Posada, which used to be the legendary Albuquerque Hilton. Ms. Butel told us her grandfather was an early railroad executive, so her connection to the New Mexican tourist industry has blood as blue as the hotel's.
(Shirley in the kitchen with Jane Butel, whose cooking classes are held in La Posada)
"We're in what was formerly the Hilton Board room, where the company made its decision to go public," Ms. Butel told the class. "This is where Conrad Hilton married Zsa Zsa Gabor." Ms. Butel tries making her own history here, training "Rockefeller chefs" and helping Campbell's design their 'Fiesta' soup line here. She put her subject in perspective. "New Mexican cuisine is simple," she explained. "It's based on just 10 ingredients. By contrast, the (Asian) Indian dowry kit includes 140," she said, before listing chile, squash, corn, beans, tomatoes, garlic, mint, oregano, potatoes, onions as the Big Ten. "My new book gets into the curative factors of the cuisine." "How Santa Fe, I thought we were in Albuquerque," grumbled Wro, who was still confused about the answer to the Official State Question and who was also pouting because none of the men in our class "looked gay." New Mexican Hybrid Chiles Ms. Butel gave us a chile overview, explaining the post World War II explosion in New Mexican hybrids, and the state's place in macho chili lore. She told us that when the Scoville scale was created to rate the heat intensity of various chilies, it was determined that the habanero, a non New Mexican trace, packed the most firepower. "We couldn't let the habanero (200,000 Scoville units) do us in, so we invented the Barker," she said. Ms. Butel explained that most chile is dried for preservation and that drying also changes the names of chilies, jalapeno becomes chipotle, for instance. We had come, by design, during the brief green chile season (August to October), when chile roasters are as common in Albuquerque as Weber grills in California. Most combine hand crank drums with two or three propane burners so that dozens of chilies can be roasted at the same time. Ms. Butel disapproved of these. "My husband bought one of those, I made him take it back," she said, before having our class roast chilies under an electric oven broiler, which took over 20 minutes. Sopapillas: A New Mexican Original Ms. Butel was more sympathetic to another distinctly local food tradition: "Sopapillas are a New Mexican original. Records of their use in Albuquerque Old Town go back to at least 1620," Ms. Butel said, adding that they were used as a reciprocal gesture to the Indians who helped feed the Spanish. "Imagine, if you had never tasted sugar nor animal fat and then suddenly your first donut! Think how exciting that must have been." Our class broke into groups, each assigned a recipe. Wro and I were paired with a retired Los Angeles Times columnist, who admitted he knew how to cook nothing, and a food professional from the Midwest. Ms. Butel oversaw all of us with equal suspicion. "Did
you wash those?" "Why
didn't you use all the flour?" "Can you slice a tomato? Let me show you how." "No, no, no. What are you doing, didn't you listen?" One class member suggested our teacher was "trying to ramrod a one-take television shoot out of a staff of tourists on vacation." Wro, fully into his vision quest, summed the experience up more philosophically. "Just as the quest for enlightenment must endure the distractions of illusion, so the path to Julia Child sometimes passes through Gordon Ramsey." Heading for El Pinto Mommy was looking for more happy-faced chile peppers. So we headed to the institution of New Mexican cuisine also known as El Pinto. The sprawling restaurant on the outskirts of town looks like a wondrous movie set, with fountains, water falls and brightly lighted patios in a cottonwood grove. It smelled like heaven, as Mesilla Valley chilies roasted over the flames of those tumbler-roasters of which Ms. Butel disapproved.
(Sit back and relax and get ready for a fine meal at El Pinto) Jim Thomas, along with and his twin brother John, owns El Pinto. "My
great-great grandfather was a Scot who came here because he had TB," he explained.
"He opened a mercantile center here. My grandmother started serving meals,
as an outgrowth of the Depression, when people had little more than a good meal
to look forward to at the end of the day." It's as a timeless restaurant, however, that it occupies sacred ground in our memories. That is where the festive lights say every night is a holiday and the love of food says everyone is New Mexican. Wro said the Zia Spirit floated in the air, "smelling like roasted green, and maybe a little red." Patrick Hancock, Executive Chef, said they keep things traditional. "I'm a New Mexico guy," he told us. "We just base things around corn, beans and chilies. Our red chile is just dried Serrano, soaked in water. Our green is always flame-roasted and hand peeled, so a little char remains." General manager Jim Garcia elaborated. "They call me HMC, Head Mexican in Charge," he said. "We kick ass in the grocery stores around here. Because we are the only place that hand peels our own roasted chilies. We go through 2500 pounds of green chile a week, or 100 tons a year." Learning a Lot in the Tequila Seminar Happy-aced Garcia gave us a tequila seminar, teaching us about…the difference between tequila and mezcal. (Mezcal comes from mescal, not agave cactus.)…aging methods (he prefers mahogany and pine casks)…and the distinctions of "reposados" (aged 6 months), anejos (aged longer than 6 months), commemoratives (aged the longest). He even taught us the different names of the glasses for drinking tequila, but I lost track after the cute little "cabritos" (long, slender shot glasses.) Garcia was also happy to talk chile. "There are four New Mexican chilies: Anaheims, Big Jim's, Sandia and M66 hybrids," he explained. "New Mexico State developed most of them. They took Anaheims and mixed them with domestic chilies from the pueblos, to derive the great hybrids. "The rule to remember is that the slimmer and the more pointed the pepper, the hotter it will be. Poblanos are a Texas thing. In New Mexico, poblanos are against the law, in chile rellenos, or anything else." Garcia also enlightened us as to the practical reason for hanging up gorgeous ristras of red chilies in the Fall. "Sun drying reduces the skin's thickness so that it is edible for caribe (chili paste) and powder," he said. "El Pinto removes the skin for caribe by colander, this is unusual, before making paste. We make chile paste by adding water and pork lard to red chile powder." Garcia agreed with Baca and Ms. Butel on the need for heat. "Our culture is defined by the food we eat. And we'd be out of business without hot chile. It's more than a macho thing, it's who we are," he said, awakening the mystic seeker in Wro. Then, Garcia turned into an ageless shaman of the Bi Polar Bear People. Said
Garcia: "Our official state question is 'Green or red?' Most people know
that. What they don't know is the correct answer. RECIPES Wok Wiz Chile Tips Dried chilies need to be roasted, or toasted to release their flavor. This is usually done by placing them on a comal (metal plate), or in a skillet, over medium heat. Press them down with a spatula and turn them so that both sides begin to change color. This should take less than two minutes. Most of the heat in chilies is concentrated in the seeds (12%) and membranes (80 %). You can reduce the fire by removing these. Be sure to wear gloves as the fire can burn the skin. Do not touch your eyes after touching seeds or membranes. If chilies need to be soaked, they will break into pieces when you try to remove the seeds and membranes. Five to ten minutes in lukewarm water should restore body. Fresh chilies can be roasted directly over a flame. Char the skin, but don't let it burn the meat. Then drop it in a paper bag and close it for 10 minutes. Peel the skin under cold running water. Remove the stem and placenta (the seeds and membrane) as desired. Wokless Wiz Recipes Green Chile Sauce 6 green
New Mexican chilies Blacken the chilies over an open flame, under a gas broiler or on a grill. Let them rest in a covered bag for 15 minutes. Remove and pull off the black skin. Cut the flesh both directions and reserve the result. Melt lard in saucepan over medium heat and saute the onion until translucent. Stir in the flour until it turns golden brown. Add the stock, stirring. Add the garlic, chilies, salt and cumin. Simmer for 20 minutes. This can be used immediately as filling for enchiladas, tacos, burritos; or as sauce for meats, frijoles or eggs. It can also be frozen for use for up to 9 months. Red Chile Sauce ½
cup onion, diced 4 cloves garlic, finely minced 2 tbsp. corn oil Bueno Ribs (This recipe evolved from one Ana Baca gave us, which called for Bueno products and Bueno barbecue sauce, which are not available everywhere. We substituted fresh garlic for granulated and we also cooked the ribs without any sauce until the last half hour. So they're 'bueno,' but not "Bueno.") 8 servings 6-8
pork shoulder ribs w/bone 3 tbsp. red New Mexican (Chimayo) chile powder or to
taste 2 tsp. black pepper four cloves fresh garlic, smashed and chopped Sprinkle
liberally both sides of ribs with chile powder, pepper, granulated garlic and
cumin. In a non-stick skillet, sear both sides of the ribs over medium-high heat
until browned. Place side by side in a roasting pan with stock on the bottom.
Preheat oven to 350 °. Sprinkle the coarse chili over ribs. Bake 3 hours.
Albuquerque
Convention & Visitors Bureau Anderson-Abruzzo
Albuquerque International Balloon Museum Beautiful
Balloons Bueno Foods Jane
Butel Cooking School El
Pinto Embassy
Suites (Click below for more travel).
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