Smoking Chiles To Make Chipotles

Wash the peppers and cut the tops off. Make a slit in the pepper from top to bottom and remove the seeds and membrane. Start your smoker about an hour before you're ready to put on the peppers and get it up to temperature, 180-200F. Put 1-2 liters of water in the pan of my smoker and then cover the pan with aluminum foil and jab a few fork holes in it to let out the steam. The foil will catch any peppers that fall through the grill rather than them getting a bath. Use a third rack in my smoker and put it right on top of the water pan. Put the peppers on the grills cross-wise so there is less chance of them falling through the bars. Close the lid and add smoking wood chips or chunks. Smoke for about 4 hours, until they turn a smoky dark color. You want to avoid burning the peppers. In my smoker, the outside perimeter of the round grills gets the hottest. So at about every hour, I take the grills out and rearrange the peppers, exchanging the darker ones from the rim with the less smoked ones in the middle. You will have to experiment with your smoker. The next step is to dry the smoked peppers. A dehydrator would be the best piece of equipment for this, but since I don't have one, I use my gas oven. I set the temperature at 150F and it takes 8-12 hours to get the peppers dry and crispy. They are dry when you can crush them in your hand.