The Best Hatch Chili Cookbooks 2023

(Gerry Furth-Sides) The recipes are so tempting it’s hard to know what to cook first from Melissa’s newest HATCH PEPPER COOKBOOKS. Hatch peppers are filled with flavor and a supple heat, from mild to spicy, without the prickly or acrid sensation of other peppers.

So the answer is just picking a new appetizer or side, entree and dessert. See our favorites below. This book offers 150 curated and specially created family recipes. There is a “must-try” dish ready for experimenting with a range of heat. And the directions from preparing the pepper to roast to storing tips.

It is only fitting that Melissa’s created the book since the company introduced the hatch peppers to the public and helped make them famous over the decades. Hatch Valley, just north of Las Cruces is home to the Hatch fields. What makes the sought-after grass green pepper unique in taste is the altitude in this southern New Mexican area where it is cold at night and hot in the daytime.  The weather in Hatch gives the mildly hot and savory pepper an obsessively delicious spicy and sweet flavor.

For our articles on the wildly popular peppers, please see //localfoodeater.com/hatch-chili-season-2023-all-you-need-to-know/

There are just as many ways to prepare and enjoy them. They work perfectly in salads, soups, stews, dips, and sandwiches.You can also try roasting them over a fire at home, indoors or outdoors.

And to be candid, we just add seasonings and/or hatch peppers chopped in any Southwestern or Latin salad, to almost any poultry for grilling, to our morning egg dishes and evening soup.

My “test” of a new favorite is to eat it a few times in a row. This white meat chicken salad made the list this year and proved a favorite — gone early because we loved it lunch and dinner and snack. It is made of chicken breast white meat from a whole chicken, spiced mayo, diced green pepper, black olives, parsley and hatch salsa sauce topping almost in the shape of a heart).

Here are a few of our favorites:

//www.melissas.com/blogs/dessert/hatch-chile-and-vanilla-bean-ice-cream

//thesalsagrill.com/events-2/hatch-chile-roast-3/