Paper Palate

First things first: if you don’t like spicy food, then this magazine is not for you.

Chile Pepper is about as niche as niche can be when it comes to food magazines, since it pretty much focuses on chile peppers and the foods that they make fiery, though there are also the occasional forays into other hot spices like black pepper and garlic. Because it is specialty magazine with a very narrow focus, one would think that after twenty years, the whole thing would be getting a bit stale, like some ancho chile powder that has gone forgotten in the back of the cupboard until it turns into brick-colored, tasteless dust.

However, that is not the case. Chile Pepper manages to deliver relevant, interesting articles and a plethora of creative recipes six times a year, including pieces by noted food writers like Rachel Travers, Robb Walsh and John Mariani. Topics covered by the magazine include “Chili: Born in the USA,” “A Kerala Christmas,” and “Jammin’ Jellies Made With Peppers.”

Early on, the focus of the magazine tended to revolve around the border cuisines of the US Southwest, but for the past decade or so, articles have been written about any and every cuisine around the world that features the heat of chile peppers. Bali, the many regions of India, Hong Kong, and Italy have all been covered in both travel pieces and articles which focus on the fiery cuisines that each region offers, with more recent articles spotlighting more unusual places and cultures where the chile is relished. (The current issue has a great article, “From Kebab to Nan,” which looks at the cuisine of the Uyghurs of the extreme westernmost province of China, Xinjiang.) Much attention has also been paid to American chefs whose creative uses of chiles run the gamut from appetizers to desserts.

Every issue includes the departments: “Hot off the Press,” (book reviews), “Hot Commodity,” (new product reports), “Salsa Scoop,” (recipes and commercial salsa reviews), “Pepper Patch,” (in-depth looks at chile pepper varieties) and “Just Desserts” (dessert recipes featuring chile).

The January/February 2006 issue (which marks the 20th anniversary of the magazine) features an upbeat article on how New Orleans restauranteurs are working hard to bring the city back to life after the devestation of Hurricane Katrina. Paul Prudhomme (K-Paul’s) and Tommy Cvitonovitch (Drago’s) both came back to New Orleans to cook and serve meals to the thousands of rescue workers, policement, soldiers and homeless citizens for weeks after Katrina, while Dickie Brennan of Bourbon House paid all of his employees while he worked to reopen his restaurant.

In keeping with the New Orleans theme, both books reviewed in “Hot Off the Presses” were related to the cooking of South Louisiana. Stir the Pot: The History of Cajun Cuisine, relates the winding trail that Cajun cookery took from the France to Canada, to the backcountry to the limelight, while the new 3rd edition of Terry Thompson-Anderson’s classic Cajun-Creole Cooking, is ready to take yet another generation of American cooks by the hand and lead them to the stovetop and so they can learn how, “First, you make a roux….”

The photography is almost uniformly impressive, with a good balance between breathtakingly gorgeous “food porn” shots of plates from celebrated restaurants, illustrative photographs showing the “how-to” of a difficult cooking technique, and still life photographs of artfully arranged raw ingredients. Much of the photography has the look of being taken in natural light, and the use of color is subtle and naturalistic. A lot of the shots are taken from interesting angles, but these angles all enhance the subject matter, and do not detract from the illustrative function that is the purpose of most food magazine photography.

My greatest criticism has to do with the amount of editorial space spent on covering chili competitions, The Fiery Food Challenge, and Zestfest. The latter two events are sponsored by Chile Pepper; The Fiery Foods Challenge is a competition between commercial producers of chile pepper based condiments, salsas, pickles, snacks and confections, while Zestfest is a cross between a trade show and shindig for the fiery foods professionals. While I feel that it is natural that the sponsoring magazine should cover these events, sometimes the coverage becomes a bit boring and the writing sounds very “insiderish,” as it is assumed that the readers are as familiar with the big names of the fiery foods world as the editors and writers of Chile Pepper are.

In the end, my criticisms are minor. The truth is, Chile Pepper is a fun magazine to read: it has great book and product reviews, interesting articles that take reader places they may never think to go on their own, and information on the hundreds of varieties of chile pepper that have been cultivated the world over. The writing style is generally lighthearted and lacks the stodgy pretension that drips from the pages of many more mainstream, general food magazines which shall remain nameless. The recipes are many and varied, and over the past several years, every one of the handful I have tried have worked quite well, without any heavy monkeying about on my part.

Rating: 8.5 for focusing a little too much on events sponsored by the magazine, though everything else pretty much makes up for it.

Pro: Fun to read, informative articles and really good recipes with good illustrations.

Con: Too much self-referential material that is boring to the average reader.

Photos courtesy of Chile Pepper.