the library

Ancho chile

Spice & roots· spice

What it is

Ancho chile is a dried, fully ripened poblano pepper, one of the most widely used dried chiles in Mexican cooking.

What it tastes like

On the nose: hot.

Every one of its 4 compounds carries a paper the library can cite.

• dihydrocapsaicintastenitrogen compoundreads as hot, pungentMeasured in 6 of 341 ingredients.cite

  0.77 ± 0.04 mg per gram dry weight, 41% of the cultivar's total capsaicinoids — the largest single capsaicinoid in ancho under ordinary field conditions, and the paper notes dihydrocapsaicin is the major component at 41-57% of the total in almost all the varieties it measured — González-Zamora et al. 2013, Molecules (Table 1 (Content of capsaicinoids in chili samples grown in an environment without thermal stress), row 'Ancho cv. Don Matias', DHC column)
• nordihydrocapsaicintastephenolreads as hot, pungentMeasured in 3 of 341 ingredients.cite

  0.25 ± 0.01 mg/g dry weight, 13% of the cultivar's total capsaicinoids. Quantified as dihydrocapsaicin equivalents per the paper's footnote. — González-Zamora et al. 2013, Molecules (Table 1, row 'Ancho cv. Don Matias', n-DHC column)
• capsaicintastenitrogen compoundreads as hot, burningMeasured in 6 of 341 ingredients.cite

  0.29 ± 0.03 mg/g dry weight, 15% of the cultivar's total capsaicinoids, with a capsaicin to dihydrocapsaicin ratio of 1:2.7. That is the second-lowest capsaicin concentration of the seven pungent cultivars measured, above only Guajillo's 0.17, and a fifty-third of Chiltepín's 15.36 mg/g in the same table. — González-Zamora et al. 2013, Molecules (Table 1, row 'Ancho cv. Don Matias', C column and C:DHC ratio column)
• homodihydrocapsaicintastephenolreads as hot, pungentMeasured in 2 of 341 ingredients.cite

  0.58 ± 0.12 mg/g dry weight, 31% of total capsaicinoids — an unusually large share for this minor capsaicinoid, which in most of the other seven cultivars sits between 2% and 14%. Quantified as dihydrocapsaicin equivalents per the paper's own footnote, so it is semi-quantified against a surrogate standard. — González-Zamora et al. 2013, Molecules (Table 1, row 'Ancho cv. Don Matias', h-DHC column)