What it means
Sit down at a New Mexican restaurant in Scottsdale and the server will ask a question before you have opened the menu: “Red or green?” It means which chile sauce you want on your enchiladas, burrito or eggs. Green chile is the pepper picked unripe, roasted until the skin blisters, peeled and chopped into a sauce that tastes bright and anywhere from mild to punishing. Red chile is the same pepper left on the plant until it ripens, then dried and ground or soaked into a smooth sauce that is deeper, earthier and usually a little gentler. If you cannot decide, say “Christmas” and you get both.
Hatch is the other word you will see, on menus, on grocery sacks and on roasters in parking lots every late summer. It is a village in southern New Mexico’s Rio Grande valley, the state’s main chile-growing region, and “Hatch chile” means a New Mexico pod grown there. It is an origin, like Napa, not a variety.
The site’s what-to-eat guide draws the line between New Mexican and Sonoran cooking; this page explains the question that line produces.
Where you’ll meet it
At Carlsbad Tavern, Frank & Lupe’s and Jalapeño Inferno, where the question is asked; on cheese crisps and burgers across the Valley, where green chile is simply applied; and in late August and September, when roasting season fills grocery parking lots with the smell of charring pods.
Where the word came from
The pepper came north with Spanish colonists and was grown as landrace varieties in northern New Mexico’s villages. The modern New Mexico chile is a product of the land-grant college. In 1913 horticulturist Fabián García, working at what became New Mexico State University, released New Mexico No. 9, selected from 14 lineages for a larger, more uniform and, by local demand, hotter pod. Most varieties grown in the Hatch Valley since descend from that program, including the Big Jim, developed with farmer Jim Lytle, which holds the record for the longest chile at 17 inches.
The question came from restaurants. “Red or green?” was simply how New Mexican waitresses took orders, and in 1996 the state legislature made it the official state question, the only one in the country; it was written into statute in 1999. The answer followed: in 1975 Martha Rotunno, a waitress at Tia Sophia’s in Santa Fe, started saying “Christmas” for customers who wanted both, and in 2007 “Red and green, or Christmas” became the official state answer. Hatch, meanwhile, has held a chile festival every summer since 1971, and the Hatch name became shorthand for the good stuff.
The spelling fight is older than the question. In New Mexican English chile is the fruit and the sauce, and chili is the Texas bowl of meat, and the state’s delegation had the distinction entered into the Congressional Record. Arizona, which cooks both Sonoran and New Mexican food and sits between the two states, mostly follows New Mexico and spells it with an e.
What it is not
Green chile is not a jalapeño, a poblano or a salsa verde; it is a specific long pod and a specific sauce. Red chile is not Texas chili. And New Mexican food is not Sonoran food: Sonoran kitchens use green chile too, in strips on a cheese crisp or folded into a burrito, but they do not ask the question, and their enchiladas are flat and their tortillas are flour. Carlsbad Tavern is New Mexican; Los Olivos is Sonoran. Both are right.
The fine print
The calendar. Green chile is harvested from roughly July into October, with the peak in August and September, which is when Hatch pods arrive in Arizona grocery stores and the propane roasters come out; the roasted pods freeze well, and longtime Valley households buy a sack and put up a year’s supply. Red chile is harvested from October into December after ripening on the plant, then sun-dried and sold whole, in ristras, or ground. The two sauces therefore have seasons, which is why a good New Mexican kitchen’s green is best in early fall and its red tastes the same all year.
The Hatch label. Because “Hatch” names a place and the varieties are public, the word has become a marketing term applied to New Mexico pods grown far from the valley, and sometimes to Anaheim peppers, which are a milder California cousin. Hatch growers argue the valley’s soil and heat make a difference. Ask where the chile is from if it matters to you; most Arizona cooks will tell you.
Heat. New Mexico pods range from mild to hot by variety, and restaurants rarely label it, so ask. The habanero dares at Carlsbad Tavern are a separate sport.
Finally, Arizona’s own contribution: the chiltepin, a tiny wild pepper from the Sonoran borderlands, is the heat in traditional Sonoran cooking and has nothing to do with Hatch. Arizona borrowed the red-or-green question from its neighbor and kept its own pepper, which is a fair summary of how this state eats.