Skillet & Sage

The regional table / Colorado

Pueblo Green Chile

Published October 13, 2026 · Colorado

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Most American regional dishes have a disputed origin; this one has a plant breeder, a bag of seed found in a dead man's garage, and a variety named after him.

The pepper is the documented part, and the man who bred it has told the story on the record. In an interview published by Colorado State University on 22 September 2022, Michael Bartolo of the university's Arkansas Valley Research Center at Rocky Ford dates the arrival: the chile "came into the area in the early 1900s as a landrace form that we historically called the 'mirasol'", mirasol "meaning looking at the sun". The families who grew it on the ground east of Pueblo — "many of them immigrated from Italy", his own among them — "produced that year after year after year and began selecting and saving their own seeds. Over generations they actually developed their own landrace of the Pueblo mirasol chile." The modern variety came out of a death in that family. Bartolo was at college in 1980 when his uncle, Harry Mosco, died; when he took up his post with Colorado State in 1991, "my dad gave me a bag of seed that my uncle had grown, it was stored in his garage". He grew out four rows, found one plant in the population worth keeping, and spent, he reckons, seven or eight years on single-plant selections before the seed was bulked up and given to growers — "which is now called Mosco, named after my uncle". Of the related pepper he later bred, CSU quotes him saying it is "derived from an heirloom race of chile pepper that has been grown in this region for generations", which is as exact a description of a landrace as a university press release is ever going to print.

The Colorado newspaper record backs the early date for the pepper and says almost nothing about the dish. The Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection sits behind a bot challenge and answers only a real browser; searched in one, the phrase "green chile" returns nothing at all before 1900 and exactly one page between 1900 and 1909. What the Pueblo paper has instead is prices. The Colorado Daily Chieftain of 12 July 1903 runs a grocer's list with "Fresh Mango Peppers, per doz 25c" and "Fresh Chile Peppers, per dos 15c" — the chiles half the price of the bell peppers, in the second week of July. Thirty years earlier the same paper carried a one-line notice: "Apples, potatoes, onions, and chile verde, at the Rough and Ready Bakery", 16 September 1873. By 10 August 1921 a Pueblo grocery advertisement lists "Green Chile" among the fresh vegetables, between the mangoes and the summer squashes. The phrase itself then multiplies in the 1910s and 1920s — 412 pages before 1930 — and in Denver it is mostly a dairy product: the Rocky Mountain News of 1 January 1914 advertises a cheese spread "With Green Chile" and argues that "chile is its very best when fresh and green, not when it has dried", and on 11 April 1918 the same paper has "Green Chile Cheese sure is rich as a welsh rarebit". The dish is not in the archive. The numbers for the pepper arrive only in 2015, when La Voz of 24 June published "Pueblo's Mirasol Chile is vital to Southern Colorado": 3 to 5 inches long, 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville heat units against a Hatch at 500 to 10,000 and a jalapeño at 2,500 to 8,000, and Bartolo telling the paper there were perhaps 500 to 600 acres under cultivation in the Arkansas Valley, with no way to be sure because the crop has no reporting requirement "like wheat or corn". The quantities below were worked out for this page.

Why this version works

Pork shoulder is the thickener as much as the flour is. Two tablespoons of flour in two quarts of liquid will not thicken anything by itself. What gives the finished pot its body is the shoulder: the USDA figure for whole pork shoulder, lean and fat, is 18.0 grams of fat and 17.2 grams of protein per hundred grams, and the connective tissue in that cut turns to gelatin over an hour and a half of simmering. Use loin or a lean chop and you get a thin, grey, sad liquid with dry meat in it, no matter what you add.

The heat is a range and the pot is where you settle it. La Voz's figures put the Pueblo mirasol between 2,500 and 5,000 Scoville units, a twofold spread within one variety, and any grower will tell you a dry season moves it. That means you cannot season this dish from a recipe: you have to taste the chiles after roasting and decide then. Keep the veins and some seeds from a few pods if the batch is mild, pull them all out if it is fierce, and correct at the end, when an hour of reduction has concentrated whatever heat was there.

Roasting is the only way to get the skin off, and the skin has to come off. The USDA record puts raw green chiles at 87.7 percent water, so what blistering over a flame does is boil the water just under the skin until the skin separates. Nothing else does this: peeling a raw chile with a knife takes the flesh with it, and simmering it unpeeled leaves transparent sheets of cuticle floating in the pot, which is the single most recognisable fault in home-made green chile. Char the skin black in patches, sweat the chiles covered for ten minutes, and the skin slips.

The variety was selected for a thick wall, and that is what survives the pot. Bartolo, asked what makes the Pueblo chile what it is, answers in the language of a breeder: "It's got a very thick wall to it, meaning it's typically used, from a culinary perspective, roasted. When it's roasted, you want that to have a real thick wall, a real meaty texture to it because it holds up to that roasting process." A thin-walled pepper comes off the fire as a wet rag and dissolves in two hours of simmering; a thick-walled one stays in recognisable pieces. That is the difference between green chile you can eat with a fork and green chile that is a green sauce.

Ingredient notes

The pork: two pounds of boneless shoulder, cut in half-inch cubes rather than bought ground or stewing-cut. Trim the big outside pads of fat and leave the seams of fat inside the meat, which is where the flavour is. Cut the cubes yourself: pre-cut stew pork is usually leg, and leg will not give you the gelatin.

The chiles: a pound and a half of fresh green Pueblo chiles, which comes to about three cups once they are roasted, peeled and chopped. The Mosco is the variety most of the Arkansas Valley crop is, and it is sold roasted by the bushel at roadside drums around Pueblo from late August. Outside Colorado, use Hatch or Anaheim and accept that you are an inch and several hundred Scoville short of the real thing — add a jalapeño or two for the gap. Frozen roasted chile is the honest off-season answer and much better than canned, which is cooked soft and salted.

The tomato: a cup of chopped tomato, and the documents do not settle whether it belongs. Pueblo kitchens vary, and nothing I could open — not the Chieftain's run, not the CSU material, not the 2015 La Voz piece — states a rule either way. Tomato softens the heat and adds a sweetness that holds the whole pot together; leaving it out gives a sharper, greener, more austere chile. Make it once each way before you take a side.

The thickening: three tablespoons of plain flour, stirred into the fat after the pork is browned. It is not there to make gravy; it is there to stop the liquid separating and to give the sauce enough grip to sit on a burger or inside a tortilla rather than running off. Masa harina, a tablespoon stirred in at the end, does the same job and adds corn flavour. Cornstarch does not — it sets clear and slick and breaks down over a long simmer.

Step by step

  1. Roast the chiles hard. Put the whole chiles directly on a hot grill, under a broiler on the top rack, or over a gas burner, and turn them until the skin is blistered and black in patches all over — 8 to 12 minutes in total, and do not be timid. You want char on the skin and the flesh still firm underneath.
  2. Sweat them, then peel, seed and chop. Pile the hot chiles into a bowl, cover it tightly and leave them 10 minutes. Then rub the skins off with your fingers, pull out the stems and most of the seeds, and chop the flesh into half-inch pieces. Keep the veins from two or three pods if the batch tastes mild. Do all of this over the bowl: the juice that collects goes into the pot.
  3. Brown the pork in batches. Heat the lard or oil in a heavy pot until it shimmers and brown the pork cubes in two or three batches, without crowding, until they have real colour on two sides. Lift each batch out as it is done. Browning in one crowded layer steams the meat grey and costs you most of the flavour of the dish.
  4. Onion, garlic, flour. Lower the heat, cook the onion in the fat until it is soft and translucent, 6 to 8 minutes, then add the garlic for a minute. Sprinkle in the flour and stir it through the fat for a full two minutes, until it smells toasted rather than raw.
  5. Add everything and simmer long. Return the pork, add the chopped chiles with their juice, the tomato if you are using it, the water or stock, the salt and the cumin. Bring it to a bare simmer and hold it there, part-covered, for 1½ to 2 hours, stirring along the bottom every twenty minutes. It is ready when the pork gives to a spoon and the liquid has gone from watery to glossy.
  6. Skim, then season for real. Tip the pot slightly and spoon off the clear fat that gathers at the edge — a quarter cup or more will come up, and taking most of it is the difference between rich and greasy. Then taste and correct the salt and the heat. An hour and a half of reduction has moved the target a long way from where it was when you seasoned at the start.
Bitterness is the commonest fault and it is almost always skin: black flakes left on the flesh taste of ash, and they do not cook out. If the pot has gone bitter there is no fix except dilution — add stock, more pork and more chile and accept a bigger batch. Next time, rub the chiles properly and rinse your fingers between pods. A thin, watery chile means either the simmer was a boil, which breaks the flour and drives off the liquid you wanted thickened, or the pork was too lean to give anything; take the lid off and reduce it hard for fifteen minutes, and if that fails stir in a tablespoon of masa harina slaked in cold water. Too hot is fixable in three ways and dairy is the fastest: a spoonful of sour cream in the bowl, more tomato in the pot, or a peeled potato cut in quarters and simmered in it for twenty minutes then removed. A flat pot, where nothing is wrong but nothing is right either, needs salt and acid, in that order — a squeeze of lime at the table does more than another half hour on the stove.

Storage and make-ahead

Green chile keeps 4 days refrigerated and is better on the second day, once the chile flavour has gone through the pork. It sets thick when cold and loosens again on the stove; add a splash of water as it reheats and expect to re-salt, because salt flattens out in the fridge. Reheat gently and never at a boil, which toughens the pork you spent two hours softening.

It freezes for 3 months in portions and comes back almost unchanged — it is one of the few stews that does. Roasted chiles freeze even better than the finished pot: bag them whole and unpeeled straight after roasting, skins on, and peel them frozen or half-thawed, which is how most Colorado households handle a bushel bought from a roasting drum in September. Thaw in the fridge overnight rather than in the pot.

What to serve with it

Flour tortillas and nothing fancy. The dish is thick enough to eat with a spoon and loose enough to wrap, and the two traditional directions are a bowl with tortillas on the side or the chile poured over something: a burrito, eggs, fried potatoes, or a cheeseburger, which in Pueblo has its own name and its own argument. Pinto beans beside it are right; rice underneath is a waste of good chile.

To drink, cold lager or horchata. The heat in a good pot of green chile builds rather than spikes, and both of those put it out. If you want wine, something white, cold and unoaked — anything tannic fights the capsaicin and loses.

From the recipe box / Colorado

Pueblo Green Chile

Roasted and peeled Pueblo chiles cooked down with cubed pork shoulder, onion and a little flour into something between a stew and a sauce — built on a pepper with a documented pedigree and a man's uncle's name, with the quantities worked out for this page.

Prep
40 min
Cook
2 hr
Total
2 hr 40 min
Serves
6
Calories
415 per serving

Ingredients

Scale

Instructions

  1. Roast the whole chiles over a flame or under a broiler until the skins are blistered and black in patches, 8 to 12 minutes.
  2. Cover them in a bowl for 10 minutes, then peel, stem and seed them and chop the flesh, saving the juice.
  3. Brown the cubed pork in the lard in two or three batches and lift it out.
  4. Soften the onion in the fat, add the garlic, then stir in the flour and cook it 2 minutes.
  5. Return the pork with the chiles and their juice, the tomato, the water, the salt and the cumin, and simmer part-covered 1½ to 2 hours.
  6. Skim the fat from the surface, correct the salt and the heat, and serve with lime wedges.

Nutrition

Fat25 g (9 g saturated)
Sodium680 mg
Protein29 g
Servingabout 1½ cups, with most of the rendered fat skimmed off
Calories415
Cholesterol105 mg
Carbohydrates18 g (8 g sugar, 3 g fiber)

Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as a courtesy, not as dietary advice.

Questions readers ask

Chile or chili?

In Colorado's own newspaper archive both spellings are in use and "chile" is the commoner of the two: before 1930 the collection returns 417 pages for "green chile" against 296 for "green chili". The 2015 La Voz article on the Pueblo mirasol goes further and cites an authority for it — an entry made by Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico in the Congressional Record of 3 November 1983, stating that the correct spelling is chile. I could not open the 1983 volume to read that entry myself, so take it as La Voz's citation rather than mine. On this page the pepper and the dish are both chile.

How hot should it be?

Hot enough to notice and not hot enough to stop you eating it, which in practice means seasoning at the end rather than the start. The honest reason recipes cannot tell you is in the figures: one named variety spans 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, and the batch in your hand sits somewhere in that range depending on the season and the plant. Taste a scrap of roasted chile before it goes in the pot, keep or discard the veins accordingly, and taste again after the simmer.

Is it a stew or a sauce?

Both, and the record does not settle it. What the documents give is a pepper selected for roasting and a town that bought it loose by the dozen in July, not a canonical dish; the thick version goes in a bowl with tortillas and the looser version goes over a burger, eggs or a burrito. The quantity of liquid here, four cups to two pounds of pork, lands between the two. Add a cup of water at the end for a sauce, or reduce it another twenty minutes for a stew.

What if I cannot get Pueblo chiles?

Then make it with Hatch or Anaheim and do not pretend otherwise. The gap is measurable: La Voz puts the Pueblo mirasol at 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units and the New Mexico green at 500 to 10,000, so a supermarket Anaheim is likely to be milder as well as thinner-walled. Add a jalapeño or two for heat and roast the peppers a little harder to make up for the thinner flesh. Frozen roasted Pueblo chile ships, and in February it is the better choice.