The first time green chile rewired my brain, I was sitting in a strip-mall taqueria in San Antonio in 2013, hunched over a breakfast burrito the size of a forearm. I had ordered it because the guy in front of me ordered it. The woman behind the counter asked, “Red or green?” and I froze. I had no idea what she was asking. I picked green because it was the second word and I’d already wasted enough of her morning. What landed on my plate was a foil-wrapped log of eggs, potatoes, cheese, and a spoonful of something molten and grassy and slightly sweet that tasted like nothing I’d eaten growing up in St. Louis. I sat in my truck in the parking lot afterward thinking, very clearly: I have been doing breakfast wrong my entire life.
That was the start of it. A few years later the Army moved me to Denver, and the obsession went from passing curiosity to full-blown lifestyle. Denver in late summer smells like roasting green chile the way Vermont in October smells like leaves. You can’t walk past an Ace Hardware or a King Soopers in September without catching it on the wind — that smoky, sweet, slightly grassy perfume of fresh chiles tumbling in a propane-fired metal cage. I started buying them by the bushel. I started freezing them in quart bags. I started putting them on eggs, on burgers, in soup, in cornbread, on pizza, in places where green chile had no business being but absolutely belonged.
When Kimi and I moved to Casper in 2022, I assumed I was leaving that world behind. Wyoming, in my head, was beef country. Steakhouses and elk and trout and maybe a chicken-fried steak if you were feeling adventurous. What I did not expect — what nobody told me — was that Wyoming has a green chile obsession every bit as serious as Colorado’s, and it shows up in places you wouldn’t think to look. Diners in Cheyenne. Burger joints in Laramie. The frozen aisle at the Smiths down the road from my house. It turns out that when you live in a state that shares a long border with Colorado and sits a day’s drive from Hatch, New Mexico, the chiles find you whether you’re looking for them or not.
The I-25 Corridor Is a Green Chile Highway
Pull up a map sometime and trace I-25 from Hatch, New Mexico north through Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Raton, Trinidad, Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Denver, Fort Collins, Cheyenne, and all the way up through Casper to Buffalo. That single ribbon of highway is one of the great food corridors in America, and the thing it carries north — alongside pickups and oilfield equipment and a startling number of horse trailers — is green chile. Wyoming is closer to Hatch than most Wyomingites realize. From Cheyenne it’s about a ten-hour drive to the chile fields of southern New Mexico, which sounds like a lot until you remember that we routinely drive four hours for a decent steak and don’t think twice about it.
What that geography means in practice is that Wyoming sits at the northern edge of green chile country. The culture doesn’t stop at the Colorado border. It bleeds north along I-25 and seeps into every town the highway touches. Cheyenne feels more like Fort Collins than like, say, Sheridan in terms of what’s on the menu. Casper, where I live, is just far enough north to be a frontier — you can get good green chile here, but you have to know where to look, and you’ll be doing some of the work yourself. By the time you get to Sheridan or Cody, the chile influence thins out and the cuisine starts leaning more toward Montana, more steak and potatoes, more wild game. But south of Casper? Green chile country. Quietly, unmistakably.
The other artery feeding this culture is Colorado’s Front Range. Pueblo, Colorado has been growing its own variety of green chile for generations, and the Pueblo chile has become a point of fierce regional pride along the Front Range. Denver has both. Fort Collins has both. And because so many Wyomingites either lived in Colorado or have family there or just drive down for Broncos games and Costco runs, the Pueblo chile has quietly crossed the border with them. Half the green chile cheeseburgers I’ve eaten in Wyoming were made with Pueblos. Half were made with Hatch. Nobody really makes a fuss about which. We just want it on the burger.
Hatch vs. Pueblo: A Spectrum, Not a Rivalry
If you spend enough time around chile people, you’ll eventually wander into the Hatch versus Pueblo argument. I’ll save you the trouble: it’s not really an argument. It’s a preference, the way some people prefer a ribeye and some people prefer a New York strip. Both are great. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Hatch is the gold standard, the chile that built the modern Southwest. Grown in a narrow stretch of the Rio Grande valley near the town of Hatch, New Mexico, where the soil is alkaline and the days are hot and the nights are cool, the Hatch chile is actually a family of cultivars — Big Jim, Sandia, NuMex 6-4, Lumbre, Barker — each with its own heat level and flavor profile. What unites them is a kind of clean, grassy, sun-baked sweetness underneath the heat. A good Hatch chile tastes like a place. You can almost feel the desert in it.
The Pueblo chile — specifically the Mirasol variety grown around Pueblo, Colorado — is Colorado’s answer to Hatch, and it’s not a copy. It’s its own thing. Pueblos are typically thicker-walled, meatier, a little sweeter, and often a touch hotter than a mid-range Hatch. They roast beautifully because there’s more flesh to caramelize. They stand up better in stew because they don’t dissolve into mush. If a Hatch chile is a lean, elegant cabernet, a Pueblo is a thick, jammy zinfandel. Both will get the job done. They’ll just get it done differently.
In my own kitchen I keep both. Hatch goes into anything where I want the chile to be the star — a simple smothered burrito, a pot of green chile stew with pork, eggs on a Sunday morning. Pueblo goes into anything heartier, where the chile is a partner rather than a soloist — chili con carne, elk chili, anything braised. If you’ve never tried Pueblo, do yourself a favor next time you’re in Fort Collins or Cheyenne in late summer. You’ll understand why people from Colorado get a little misty about them.
Roasting Season: The Best Smell in the Mountain West
If you’ve never been in a King Soopers parking lot in late August when they fire up the chile roaster, you owe it to yourself to make the trip. From roughly the third week of August through the end of September, grocery stores up and down I-25 set up these big rotating metal cages outside the entrance — propane-fired, hand-cranked, loud as a leaf blower — and they fill them with fresh chiles and tumble them over open flame until the skins blacken and blister and pop. The smell is unlike anything else. Smoky, sweet, vegetal, a little sharp. It hits you in the parking lot and follows you into the store and then back out to your truck, and you find yourself buying a five-pound bag you didn’t plan on buying because the smell has taken over your decision-making.
Roasting season is an event. People line up. They bring coolers. They argue about whether to get mild or medium or hot. In Pueblo there’s an actual festival — the Chile and Frijoles Festival every September — that draws something like 150,000 people. In Wyoming we don’t have a festival of our own yet, but we have the roasters. Most years a propane rig will set up in the parking lot of one of the larger grocery stores in Cheyenne for a weekend or two during peak season, and if you time it right you can leave with a bag of fresh-roasted chiles still steaming through the plastic.
The ritual at home is its own kind of meditation. You let the chiles steam in a sealed bag for fifteen or twenty minutes so the skins loosen. Then you peel them — sticky, blackened skin sliding off in sheets, your hands stained green and orange and smelling like smoke for the rest of the day. You pull the stems, scrape out the seeds if you want less heat, and freeze what you don’t use in flat quart bags. A bushel of fresh-roasted chiles, processed right, will get you through to the next roasting season.
Where Wyoming Locals Actually Find Green Chile
For the ninety percent of the year that isn’t roasting season, Wyoming cooks rely on a small but reliable network of sources. Smiths, City Market down in Rock Springs, and King Soopers when you cross into Colorado all stock canned and frozen options year-round. Walmart has stepped up its Hispanic foods aisle in recent years, and you can usually find canned Hatch-brand chiles even in towns that don’t have a dedicated Mexican market.
My pantry is never without a bag of Bueno frozen Hatch green chile in the deep freeze. Bueno is the New Mexico brand that ships frozen, flame-roasted, peeled, and chopped chile across the country, and for my money it’s the closest thing to fresh-roasted you can get in February when there’s two feet of snow on the ground. For shelf-stable options, the Hatch Green Chile Company canned chiles are what I reach for when I’m making something quick — a weeknight queso, a pot of beans, a breakfast scramble.
The wild card in Wyoming is the roadside vendor. Every August and September, you’ll start seeing pickup trucks parked at gas stations and rest stops along I-25 and US-87 with hand-painted signs reading HATCH CHILE or FRESH ROASTED. These are usually families from the Hatch valley making the drive north with a trailer-load of chiles and a portable roaster, and they’re worth pulling over for. Cash works best. Have a cooler in the truck. I’ve stopped at a vendor outside Wheatland two years running now, and both times I’ve come home with a bag big enough to give some away.
How Wyoming Cooks Actually Use It
The patron saint of Wyoming green chile cooking is the green chile cheeseburger. Find a small-town diner anywhere in southern or central Wyoming and check the menu. There will be a green chile cheeseburger. It will be on a soft bun, probably with American or pepper jack, probably with a half-cup of chopped roasted chile piled on top like it’s daring you. The first bite is always a little startling — the heat, the sweetness, the way the chile and the beef and the cheese turn into one thing on your tongue.
From there it spreads outward. Breakfast burritos are the second great vehicle. In fact the recipe I’m posting next is exactly that: a Wyoming green chile breakfast burrito built for cold mornings and long drives. Green chile stew — pork shoulder, potatoes, onions, garlic, a quart of chopped chile, simmered until the pork falls apart — is winter food at its most elemental.
And then there’s the wild game crossover, which is where Wyoming really makes the cuisine its own. Elk chili with Hatch green chile has become one of my favorite cold-weather meals — the lean, slightly sweet flavor of elk plays beautifully against the grassy heat of roasted Hatch. I’ve seen antelope green chile, venison green chile, even bison green chile on menus in Lander and Pinedale. This is Wyoming cooking borrowing the best ingredient the Southwest has to offer and putting it to work on what’s in our freezers.
Red or Green? Wyoming Has Picked a Side.
New Mexico’s official state question — codified into law in 1996 — is “Red or green?” Wyoming has no official state question, but if you spend enough time eating in this state, you start to notice that the same question keeps coming up. At Taco John’s in Rock Springs. At the diner in Wheatland. At a brewery in Sheridan that puts green chile on their patty melt. The question travels with the chile, and the chile travels north.
Wyoming has quietly answered green. Not officially. Not on any menu board. But culturally, in the freezers of cooks across the state, in the parking-lot roasters that show up every August, in the burgers that line diner menus from Evanston to Newcastle. Green fits us. It’s fresh and immediate and a little wild, which is more on-brand for a state that built its identity around open space and the present tense.
A Chile That Connects Us
The thing I’ve come to love about green chile, beyond the way it tastes, is what it represents. The green chile that fills the freezers of cooks in Cheyenne and Casper and Laramie is the same green chile filling freezers in Albuquerque and Pueblo and Denver. It’s a shared ingredient. It’s a shared ritual. It’s the smell of a parking lot in August that means the same thing whether you’re in Las Cruces or Lander.
For me — a guy from St. Louis who got his food brain rewired in a San Antonio taqueria, who spent his Denver years buying chiles by the bushel, who landed in Casper not expecting to find any of it here — green chile has become the through-line. It’s the ingredient that connects every place I’ve lived in the West. My freezer right now has three quart bags of chopped Bueno, two of fresh Pueblos I roasted myself last September, and one of mystery chiles I bought from a guy in a Ford F-250 outside Wheatland. I’ll go through all of it before September comes back around.
If you’re new to all this, start small. Buy a can of Hatch. Throw it on a cheeseburger. Or wait until next August, drive down to Fort Collins, and pick up a five-pound bag of fresh-roasted Pueblos straight off the roaster. You’ll figure out pretty quickly why Wyoming has quietly become a green chile state. For more on where to find great chile-forward cooking around the state, check out my running list of the best Mexican food in Wyoming.
Red or green? Around here, you already know the answer.