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what are chipotle peppers?
chipotle peppers are in fact jalapeno peppers! i know what you're thinking - jalapeno peppers that we get in the store, and what we use most in cooking, are green. well, if you leave those green jalapenos on the plant until they fully mature, they become red and lose some of their moisture content. those are the peppers that are used to make chipotles. they're picked off the plant and “smoke-dried”, and that means instead of just drying them in a dehydrator or in the sun, they're dried using wood smoke, which gives us that smoky flavor we so love!
we also use smoked paprika in our chipotle toum, which is produced in a similar way with sweet peppers instead of jalapenos.
what peppers mean to me
there are many ingredients chefs use to define their cuisine. i feel like sometimes we choose these ingredients. for example, i love fennel and all anise flavored things. but sometimes the ingredients choose us, and i think that's what happened with me and peppers.
the first time i ever sat down and started thinking about peppers was when i worked for chefs laura and sayat, the husband and wife duo that currently run a kick-ass restaurant called dalida (if you haven't gone, do yourself a favor and go!). anyways, what i found so interesting is that laura is mexican and sayat is turkish/armenian, and both their countries' use peppers in so much of their cuisines, but in different ways. learning from these two powerhouses opened my mind to why peppers are so important. peppers don't just add heat, but they add a special kind of deep umami that is very subtle, yet makes all the difference when not added to certain dishes.
chipotle toum: a brief history
looking back on this now is kind of surreal. shawarmaji was a dream; we hadn't even started doing pop-ups yet. but i remember being excited. that's still very vivid. i had been thinking about it for a while, and i just really wanted to experiment with shawarma.
after a lot of thought and the restaurant that i was working at closing down, i decided to buy my own shawarma spit. my friends and i often gathered over dinners and day-dreamed about the food we grew up eating and how awesome it would be to have access to it in the bay area food scene. i remember during one of the very first shawarma dinners my wife and i hosted, the center of our discussions became what shawarma could be in america, so we would talk about the classics, the meat options, the different styles, the ingredients, the sauces, and new methods that were emerging back home that we didn't experience as younger people (like a horizontal shawarma spit roasted over coal!).
one of the things we talked about that really stuck with me was creating a bacon (halal of course) layered chicken shawarma. the initial idea was layering beef bacon in between a ranch-like marinated chicken with jalapenos. i was convinced this would be really tasty. a welcomed afterthought was adding a rich cheddar cheese, which quickly developed into what would become shawarmaji's jalapeno bacon chicken (JBC) shawarma - jalapeno bacon cheddar at the time though.
like the classics that become so complete with each of their distinct sauces (toum with chicken and tahini with lamb), i wanted the JBC to have its own that would boost the flavor of the marinade. since it was a chicken shawarma, what made most sense was to create a new toum for it, and a cool marinade wanted a spicy toum. this was the beginning of what has now become one of our top product sellers. some JBC spits and spicy toum iterations later, our chipotle toum recipe solidified. the rest, as they say, was history.
my favorite ways to use peppers:
there are many ways to use peppers in cooking and food prep, but these are just some of my favorites and how i use them most often.
chili flakes/aleppo pepper flakes – this is the most common way I add peppers in my everyday cooking. usually straight into hot oil before sauteing something or garnishing at the end.
paprika – this spice is such a useful tool in the kitchen. i mainly use it to make delicious soups or fun spiced rice. it's also one of the main ingredients in our chicken shawarma spice mix.
pepper paste/shatta – i use these interchangeably and sometimes together. but i generally go for shatta when i want what i'm cooking to have more of a kick. you should add them the next time you make a tomato sauce. you can thank me later ;)
fresh peppers – spicy or sweet, i like to add them to my food when im building flavor in the beginning, like when sauteing onions and garlic or mirepoix (this is why cajun food is so good).
pickles – adding peppers to pickle brine is definitely something i took from my grandmother. she added green chilis to everything she pickled to give it the pepper flavor. 1 or 2 serrano or jalapenos are enough for flavor and won't add too much heat, unless you crack or cut them. but if you like heat, feel free to add more!
thank you to every one of you who continually support our small family business, allow me to share my musings, and give me the opportunity to live my dream by serving our community the food that i love (and live) to eat.
peace, love, and toum,
chef mohammad abutaha
