Anaheim

The Anaheim is a mild, versatile New Mexican chile popularized in California, featuring long, tapered pods ideal for roasting and stuffing. Named after the city of Anaheim where it was commercially cultivated in the early 1900s, this workhorse pepper offers gentle heat and earthy flavour. Its thick walls and large size make it the pepper of choice for chiles rellenos and roasted chile dishes.

History & lineage

The Anaheim is a New Mexico chile by parentage that took a Californian name. Emilio Ortega — whose family would later found the Ortega brand — moved to New Mexico in 1890, developed a taste for the chile grown there, and carried seed home to California a few years afterwards. Ortega's own account places that homecoming at the family's adobe house in Ventura, not Anaheim, and gives no year for it; the 1894 date attached to this story almost everywhere is repetition rather than record. The name came later, from where the crop was grown commercially in Southern California.

New Mexico State University, which has run the longest continuous chile breeding programme in the world since Fabián García founded it in 1888, is blunt about the result: its own cultivar record says the New Mexican pod type "is often mistakenly called 'Anaheim'". The same document then concedes the other half of the argument — that the seed taken to California "has remained for many years, developing site-specific traits and becoming a variety of its own". Both sentences are from the same institution, and the honest answer is that whether Anaheim and New Mexico chile are one variety is still open.

The distinction matters commercially enough to have reached the statute book. New Mexico passed a law in 2012 prohibiting chile from being sold in the state as "New Mexican" unless it was grown there or carried a prominent disclaimer — a measure aimed squarely at chile of this type grown elsewhere and sold on the reputation of Hatch. Watch out for one widely repeated claim in the other direction: that Anaheim was developed from García's 'New Mexico No. 9'. The dates rule it out, since Ortega took his seed west two decades before No. 9 was released in 1913.

Culinary uses

Roasted and peeled, in quantity. This is the chile of the great Southwestern roasting drums that appear outside supermarkets in late summer, and the flavour it is grown for only arrives once the skin has blistered and come away. From there it goes into green chile stew, chiles rellenos, enchilada sauce and anything involving pork. Ripened red and dried it becomes a chile ristra and then a red sauce, which is a different dish entirely from the green — in New Mexico, "red or green?" is a question you get asked rather than a preference you volunteer. Mild enough to use as a vegetable rather than a seasoning.

Growing it in the UK

Annuum is the forgiving group, and the right place to start. Seed germinates readily in warmth, the season is short enough to finish outdoors in a good summer, and February to early March is soon enough to sow. Germination is given as 7-14 days. At 70 days to maturity it is one of the quick ones: sown in March, it will be picking well before the light goes.

At 45–75 cm it wants a 7- to 10-litre pot and a sheltered spot: a greenhouse, a porch, or the sunniest wall you have. The record puts the yield at heavy, so start feeding weekly with something high in potassium as soon as the first fruit sets — a plant carrying that much will run out of steam otherwise.

Thick walls suit it to stuffing, roasting and fresh use rather than drying.

Read from this variety's own record — the figures are in the panel opposite.