ARLEE — If you head several hours south out of Montana, you can make it into the heart of chile pepper country. But there is no need to go that far, Montanans are roasting peppers right here at home.
Chile peppers are a staple of food and life across the southwest. During a farm stay in Arizona, that is where Kaly Hess learned to love them. Hess and her partner, Brian Wirak, own Harlequin Organic Produce in Arlee.
“Peppers tend to be a crop that we just keep growing over and over, even though I find them very challenging,” Hess said. “They kind of introduced us to pepper culture.”
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Like the spice in the chiles, that culture can be intense. In New Mexico, chiles are an official state vegetable, in most of the food and are even on the license plates. In addition to the more common crops, peppers and a passion for them are growing at Harlequin.
“We grow Anaheims, hatch variety and poblanos,” Hess said. “I would say probably poblanos are my favorite pepper. They have this like thick-walled, earthy, kind of smoky flavor to them. They're fun to harvest. They're beautiful. Or the Hatch variety is also pretty good too.”
The pepper process begins in the propagation house in March, then moves to tunnels and, eventually, trellises in the field.
“We usually start picking like mid-August,” Hess said.
After the harvest comes the most iconic part of chile season: roasting. This involves heating the chiles in a spinning metal drum. The process softens the peppers, allows for them to store better and adds a smokey flavor.
While they are pretty standard in parking lots in the southwest, roasters are much more of a rarity in Montana. Hess chalked that up to awareness about peppers, more than the crops themselves.
“There's not a lot of vegetable farms, let alone farms that are growing peppers. They're just not part of our culinary landscape,” she said. “The these type of peppers specifically are well-suited for the Montana climate.”
So, Harlequin is on a mission to bring some southwestern spice up north. Peppers are a part of their community-supported agriculture program, which provides produce boxes to the Missoula and Jocko Valleys, and their farm sales.
“If folks are looking to purchase from us, they can buy from us direct on our website or they can shop our warehouse sale in October, and we'll be roasting peppers at that sale,” Hess said. “For us, building the market for roasted peppers just also helps build that market so we can continue to grow.”
The Harlequin team typically roasts once a week during chile season, and at events, like their sales. When they do fire up the roaster in front of the public, it gets quite a reaction.
“If they know what it is, they're pumped that that's happening in Montana. If they don't know, then there's usually a lot of education that needs to happen, as far as how to use them, how to store them, do they freeze?”
Hess said that the roasting has paid off, people are excited about peppers, and Hess plans to keep the chiles coming.
“I feel like Brian, my partner, and I have been trying to build over the years and we definitely have, I think, grown the roasted pepper market,” she said. “I think it's important to keep doing it because it's something that we love.”
