Chinese Stir-Fried Tiger-Skin Peppers

I remember driving through Hatch, New Mexico, during chile season one summer on a cross-country road trip. The area is famous for the quality (and heat level) of the various cultivars of New Mexico chile it grows, and every summer during chile season you’ll find chiles tumbling around inside iron cages like bingo balls as farmers, gas station attendants, grocery store clerks, and families roast the chiles over open gas flames for sale or for their freezers. The smell that permeated the air was intoxicating. Smoky, charred, sweet, grassy, and hot.

A few summers later, on the opposite side of the planet, I smelled the same aroma again at a restaurant in Chongqing, where I’d asked the chef to prepare their specialties. I was working my way through a delicious salad of chopped rabbit with chiles and peanuts, dutifully popping pieces into my mouth, sucking off the succulent, chile-laced meat, and depositing the tiny bones in a bowl, when the server dropped the next dish at my little table, his back already turned to me as he hurriedly made his way back to the kitchen. As soon as the smell hit me, I was transported back to that summer driving through New Mexico. I guess charred, blackened chiles are a universally appealing aroma.

The dish was hupi qingjiao, or “tiger-skin peppers,” so called because of the way pepper skins will split as they char, forming stripes like a tiger’s coat. Just as the best way to enjoy Hatch chiles is in chile-forward dishes like New Mexico chile verde, so too tiger-skin peppers is a simple, chile-forward dish with only a few auxiliary ingredients to complement the pepper flavor. In Chongqing, the dish was made with small, moderately hot Hunan peppers called xiao qingjiao (literally “small green pepper,”) but back here in the United States I use whatever I can get my hands on. When Hatch chile season rolls around and I can find them locally in California, I snatch them up. Otherwise, regular old Anaheims (a milder California cultivar of the same New Mexico chiles) or long green peppers from the Asian supermarket work well. If you are a chile-head who can handle the heat, even serrano or jalapeño chiles will work in this recipe.

There are a number of different techniques I’ve found for how to cook this. Some recipes recommend stir-frying the chiles in a little oil. Some suggest deep-frying until the chiles split open. My favorite technique is the one that produces the most char: cooking the chiles in a dry wok, pressing on them firmly with the bottom of my wok spatula to get really good contact between the chiles and the metal. When the wok is the right temperature, you should be able to feel the vibrations in your spatula (just like a video game rumble pack) as the chiles bubble and split under the heat and pressure.

Once the chiles are tender and charred, the rest is a quick stir-fry of garlic seasoned with soy sauce. The recipe includes directions for adding pork to the stir-fry, but the pork is completely optional. I leave it out most of the time. The chiles are the real star here.