Ancho chile: the dried poblano, sweet and barely hot

The ancho is a dried poblano, and that transformation is the interesting part. A fresh poblano tastes green and vegetal. The same chile dried in the sun loses all of that and develops sugars, notes of raisin and prune, and a clear sweetness.

Drying a chile does not simply concentrate it. It turns it into a different ingredient.

Wide-shouldered — ancho means wide — deeply wrinkled, and so dark a red that held to the light it reads brown.

How hot is an ancho

1,000 to 3,000 Scoville units, milder than a mild jalapeño. It is the gentlest of the common dried chiles and the one to reach for when you want dried-chile depth in something the whole table will eat.

If you want the salsa to bite, three toasted chiles de árbol alongside the anchos will do it without touching the color or the sweetness.

The naming mess, cleared up

This is the most common confusion in the dried chile aisle:

• The dried poblano is the ancho. Not the pasilla.
• The pasilla is the dried chilaca — long, narrow, nearly black.
• In some US markets, a fresh poblano is sold labeled “pasilla”, and the error propagates to the dried chile.

Visual test: ancho is wide and reddish; pasilla is long, thin and black.

Ancho and mulato: the pair that really does look alike

These two are genuinely hard to tell apart, because both come from poblano varieties and look nearly identical in a bin.

Hold them to the light. The ancho reads clearly reddish; the mulato reads dark brown, almost chocolate. Smell them. Ancho smells of raisin, mulato of cocoa with a liquorice edge. Mulato is also slightly sweeter and even milder.

If your store only has one of them, substitute one for the other without worrying. The salsa comes out fine and slightly different.

How to use it

Devein it, always. Its veins are bitter and add nothing.

Toast 20 seconds a side on a dry comal, pressing with a spatula. It puffs slightly and starts to smell sweet, like dried fruit. That is the moment to pull it.

Soak 20 minutes, not ten — its skin is among the thickest. Very hot water with the heat off, never boiling.

Strain after blending. Without it, the salsa scratches.

Add acid at the end

Ancho is sweet with no acidity of its own, so an ancho salsa can taste round but strangely flat. Two teaspoons of apple cider vinegar stirred in at the end lift the whole thing: the acid cuts the sweetness and pushes the raisin notes forward.

Same principle as the splash of vinegar or sour fruit in a mole.

What ancho is for

Mostly as a base rather than a table salsa. It is the backbone of pork adobo, of mild red enchiladas, of carne enchilada, and of several moles including mole poblano.

Its usual role is to provide body and sweetness while another chile — árbol, puya, chipotle — provides the heat.

Buying and storing

Pliable, never brittle, and it should smell of raisin when you hold it to your nose. Check the folds for white dust, which is mold, and for pinholes, which are weevils.

Sealed glass jar, away from light and moisture, well over a year.