Doin' The Roasted Chile Math

I have a particular weakness for the local, organic chiles sold by Full Circle Farms, roasted before your eyes at the Boulder Farmers' Market. Not only are they local and organic, but you can also tell whether you are getting an Anaheim, a Big Jim, a poblano, or a Dynamite. However, you can also buy chiles roasted at the store here in Boulder, Sunflower and Whole Foods being among the stores I know of that are roasting. The store-roasted chiles are generally identified as being Hatch (NM) green chiles, in designations of mild, medium, and hot. The store-roasted ones aren't organic, but in a conversation with a produce guy at Whole Foods last year, I learned that chiles are natural pest deterrents (sometimes being ground up to be used as a natural pesticide themselves), and therefore don't get treated with nasty stuff.

I buy a bunch of chiles during the late summer roasting season and freeze them to get me through the rest of the year. In choosing between the local organic chiles and the Hatch ones at the store, here's the math to be done: the Full Circle Farms organic ones run $7 a pound (also available in half or whole bushels) at the Farmers' Market, while Whole Foods currently has their store-roasted Hatch chiles on sale for $1.99 a pound, normally just $2.99, and I presume Sunflower is running somewhere around that as well. (Aternoon update - the price today at Sunflower is $1.99 a pound as well.) My solution was to buy some of those organic Dynamites, while making the majority of my stock the mediums (also sometimes available in mild or hot) from Whole Foods. All those chiles are now happily in my freezer, laid out flat in plastic bags for easy removal of the right amount (the last thing you want is a big ball of frozen chiles, requiring a chisel to break them off, if you're lucky), ready to get me through to next year's roasting season.