Using the power of the sun to roast green chile
sandia.gov
sandia.gov
Get more than you think you'll eat.
You choose your variety of chile (and the heat) and buy it in 25 lb increments. They fresh roast it for you at that time. 25 lbs is a lot of chile and it’s perishable, so you have to take it home and process it. Ideally will last most of the year. I peel and eat as much as I can while it’s fresh, and for the rest, it’s best to freeze it with the skins still on, as they’re easily removed when it’s thawed.
Sadly, last year had no flavor, but this year tastes good, but the heat scale seems to be offset down one level
In the Seattle area, Haggen does this - but not King County this year! Whole Foods used to do roasting but seem to not do that anymore
Since an internet page is forever, finding THIS YEARS roasting schedule is not a trivial problem
Every year we get 2 boxes and have them roasted, then clean and freeze them. Towards the end of the year the stash gets a little low and have to start rationing.
The boxes are big, but much smaller after roasting. They then put the roasted chiles in plastic bags so you can carry them home. You then have to wait a few hours to peel and de-seed the chiles because they are so hot from roasting.
It's a tradition here and many people from all walks of life are out buying roasted chiles from now until the frost.
I tend to leave them whole after cleaning the seeds.
If you have a vacuum sealer that’s the way to go
Most solar ovens can get high temps, but they require tradeoffs on scale or speed.
My grandfather was a farm worker. He would bring home red chiles from the fields and roast them in the sun on his roof. So my first reaction to this story was "what's the big deal?"
> Using 38 to 42 of the 212 heliostats — mirror-like devices used to focus sunlight — at the thermal test facility, Ken was able to achieve a temperature above 900 degrees Fahrenheit uniformly across the roasting drum, he said. This is comparable to the temperature of a traditional propane chile roaster.
Your standard oven certainly isn't going to get to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. So maybe 90's drum cookers could roast things like chicken wings, but probably not chiles.
Not really a practical or serious technology at this time.
You want to blister the skin so it peels off easily. That's the main goal, but a lot of flavor comes out of caramelizing / charring things during the process, as well.
If you cook things too much, the entire pepper just turns to mush.
Heating things up enough to blister the skin means that the inside is steamed in the process. You want to get it so that it's cooked, but will still hold up enough to be peeled and sliced.
Cooking them perfectly is a balancing act of distance to the flame and the cooking time. I always use the broiler on the highest setting. It takes a few iterations with every new oven for me to dial in the exact timing and distance. Ideally you want to char the outside, while retaining the "structure" of the pepper flesh - not too mushy, but still a little toughness.
It doesn't nearly compare to the complexity of a real hatch pepper, but being 3000 miles from Hatch NM, I'll take it!
The smell sucks people in. Can’t do that on a web site - yet
They may have eliminated a lot of CO2, but the smoke could still use some attention! (You definitely don't want to get your head near there to see how the roasting is coming!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_Energy_Systems
The only thing that's really new in solar in the last thirty years is the steady progress of semiconductor physics and technology. All the rest of it just follows from "sun is large and hot" which has been known for a long long time.
If you build it large enough, though, it'll raise the temperature of the sun!
All a solar concentrater does is increase the rate of energy transfer between the object being heated and the sun. The hot side gets colder and the cold side gets hotter. The only thing driving this energy transfer is the temperature difference, so once the temperatures are equal there is no more energy transfer. If you make it really huge, the temperatures equalize faster. This can increase the equilibrium temperature of the object because it's also losing heat to its environment. Bigger mirrors push the equilibrium temperature closer to the temperature of the sun, but never exceed it. It doesn't matter that the mirrors focus the radiation, because mirrors are not directional. They work equally well to transfer energy from the object to the sun if the object happens to be hotter. Whoever downvoted me doesn't understand thermodynamics.
[1] https://www.rudrasolarenergy.com/solar-cookers.html (parabolic mirror based “cooker”)
https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/gobar-gas-plant-3976916... (basically methane collected from composting)
Searching for a couple keywords on Taobao and apparently you can still buy those things. E.g. https://www.taobao.com/list/item/wap/595475929092.htm
that's not different from regular cooking, your home oven might not get that hot but lots of cooking implements do
"Armenian scientists Gregor Mnatsakanyan and Vahan Hamazaspyan originally created the satellite dishes with dreams of distributing them around the country. Hamazaspyan, a pioneer in the study of solar energy use, began developing the first prototypes in the 1980s, after the devastating Spitak earthquake. Satellite solar ovens, he hoped, would feed his countrymen affordably during hard times."
My sense is that these are being roasted to make chillis rellenos. But I thought chillis rellenos were usually made with pasilla chillies? I didn't think those were noted for having tough skin.
Also, IME roasting is one thing, skinning another. My process is: roast chillies; put in plastic bag in fridge; wait 10 mins; scrape off skin. Where's the solar fridge, and the team of chilli scrapers? Scraping one chilli is a job that takes about a minute. A 20lb drum of raosted chillies I'd guess is a day's work.
If I had to guess, I'd say they're Hatch aka New Mexico chilies.[0] Once roasted, the now blistered skins are easily separated, discarded, and the remaining fruit can be consumed and enjoyed.
I'm a brit, and can't get fresh chillies from the USA or Mexico. I have a stash of dried Mexican chillies, and I can buy fresh chillies from the Netherlands, but they don't say what the variety is.
There are quite a few UK growers that produce fresh chillies, but they're usually Habanero, Ghost or Reaper; they mainly sell them bulk to makers of hot sauce, not retail. And some middle-eastern shops sell ultra-mild large green fresh chillies, that I think are used in shawarma wraps and greek salads. They have no heat at all.
For better or worse it's more common than salt here; they are being roasted to make everything.
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The other question is: is it cheaper to do this, or just to set up solar panels and a resistive heating element based roaster.
I don't know of any super high temperature heat pumps, but that's the next thing I think of in making the process more efficient.
- A contemptuous New Mexican.
What's more confusing to me is that different places cook them differently. Some places I love green and hate red, and some vice versa.
Though in places that do both equally well, I gotta say I'm team red :).
not yet, though!
This actually makes me want to buy one to play with…
Them's fight'n words.
I do like that coffee. Nice strong robust roast without tasting burnt.
The next Chile & Frijoles Festival is Sept 23-25th https://pueblochilefestival.com
Radioactive materials are also due to the sun, ours or others elsewhere in the universe. Earth does not produce them.
Whatever heat our planet had in the beginning and continues to have, originated from the sun. No sun, no heat
It also doesn't really matter, does it?
So there is vegetable, dish, temperature, country and informal variant word for child (though this last one is only an issue in orthography)
I mean. Still a minor. But it stings to this day.
You’d be surprised how quickly and frequently you are interpreting the correct definition of words in english just based on context.
Learning another language helped me realize this. I would, frustrated, complain about how two words sound the same or are spelled the same and my older wiser friend would simply point out examples in english that I have no problem with.
Anyways, unless you were confused yourself and you’re being modest about it, I wouldn’t be so quick to assume anybody else is having trouble grappling with the word here.
Disclaimer: I love New Mexico -- I'm just taking the piss. It's probably one of the most underrated states in the union.
El Parasol: https://elparasol.com/
Google Street View of the sign to the Chile Works, off Trinity Drive: - https://www.google.com/maps/@35.8796938,-106.3006991,3a,75y,...
e.g. Vick's Vittles, Tia Betty Blues, Golden Pride, and of course the old standby Grandma's K & I Diner which has been feeding nuclear engineers for 62 years.
For those who do find themselves bothered by this kind of thing, these projects are almost always a few layers deep on what they're actually researching. I would assume this is more fun demo with a potential economic application in large scale roasting but that the research value (and intern training value) are in the general research area of broad solar concentrator R&D. If you look at the publication history for the folks involved you'll see a lot of papers on molten salt solar concentrators (materials, plant design, physics of etc).
Sandia does a lot of really interesting and valuable research (across all the sites but NM and CA in particular).
I hope green energy enthusiasm doesn't take us back to the days of waterwheels being directly connected to grist-mills.