Economics of making your own Chipotle powder.

Rather than looking at the straight economics,it might pay to raise one batch of japs,make the powder,store/stabilize the product,compare the quality with a sample from a good chile pepper house,chart your actual personal usage,decide if the project will be consistent enough not to actually ruin recipes, and decide if this will be a volume/repeat process-or a once in a lifetime.

Just a couple of thoughts.

Given your problem, I'm with Tom. Just do it.

CAUTION, WARNING.

Buy a respirator and gloves. When you grind dry peppers, the dust can send you straight to the hospital.

You would need about 40 pounds (I believe it is 1:10 ratio) of peppers to make 4 pounds of powder. Sounds like a lot of work. I am not sure you would taste the difference, especially if you are going to use it in the smoker. But hey, I am all for creating your own stuff, so go for it! Take lots of notes and pictures. We all love that stuff.

Last year I grew my own peppers: jalapenos, serranos, and habaneros. The bushes were very prolific and made more peppers than I knew what to do with, until I came up with the idea to smoke them until dry, then grind into powder.

I slit all the peppers except the habaneros and arranged them in rows on the fish/vegetable grills. I put 2 oz. mesquite in my SM025, set the temperature to 250 degrees and let them go like that for 2 hours. After that I opened the door and rearranged the peppers so the ones drying out the fastest were in the front. Then I put in another 2 oz. of mesquite and let them go another hour at the same temperature, opening the door again and rearranging the peppers like I did before. I continued this every hour, pulling the peppers as they dried out, until all of them were dry. The entire process took about 5 hours. The 2 chunks of wood was more than enough and the peppers were plenty smoky.

I bought a brand new grinder so I wouldn't mess up my other grinders. After a little trial and error I discovered that if I put the peppers in whole, they'd get hung up under the blades. So I crumbled them up with my fingers as I was loading the grinder. I wore latex gloves and stood back as I did the crumbling and grinding, and I had no bad effects.

The jalapeno powder has a wonderful smoky flavor. I use it in or on food I want to give the taste to with just a slight touch of heat. The serranos and habaneros are another story. Let's just say that a little goes a long, long way!! I had so much of the powder I gave some to my friends. They all raved about it, and my wife and I liked it a lot, too. So it looks like I'm going to grow more peppers and make a bunch more powder again this year.

I also did some in October 2009...

Here in Quebec (Canada) the chipotle are not a common thing and quite expensive, I could only find the one in cans or jars in "oil/liquid"...

so I decided to try out for the dried ones...

I went to the local grower's market and found some quite nice jalapenos, for quite cheap. they where selling them in little baskets of 10 fo about 5$, so I talked with the grower and I had a good deal for 60-70 J, for 15$.

I then slit them open on both sides, kept the seeds, spread out the peppers on the 3 shelves and put some mesquite in smokebox. Set the smoker at 225 and leaft them there, opening the door every hour to let moisture out.

The peppert where dried in about 8-10 hours, quite tasty, hot and smoky. I then grinded them.

I used it a lot in marinades for things that I did not cook in smoker (rib steaks, chicken breast...) and it gave a quite nint little hint of smoke and heat to them...

I will definitely do some more this autumn...

Last autumn I did some hot sauce with my home grown finger hot peppers...

quite good too...