Marketing Director, Hatch Chile Store

Pam Rowell

Writes our educational chile content, seasonal guides, and recipe posts.

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How I Found Hatch Chile

Like a lot of the customers I write for now, I didn’t grow up eating Hatch green chile. My family moved to El Paso in 2008, just across the border from New Mexico, and that’s where I first ran into it. I’ll admit I was hesitant at first. A long green pod that doesn’t look much like a bell pepper, with a flavor I couldn’t place from anything I’d cooked with before.

It took one bite of properly roasted, peeled Hatch chile to change that. Smoky, sweet, vegetal, and just enough heat to wake the dish up without taking it over. I also assumed, like a lot of people, that you could only get it in August. The whole point of what we do at the Hatch Chile Store is to push back on that idea. Hatch chile is a year-round ingredient if you know where to look.

What I Do at Hatch Chile Store

I lead marketing at the Hatch Chile Store, which is a fancy way of saying I spend a lot of time thinking about how to help people who’ve never set foot in the Hatch Valley actually understand what Hatch chile is and what to do with it. That covers a few things:

Educational content, the difference between fresh, frozen, dried, and powdered chile; how the heat scale really works; what makes Hatch different from Anaheim, Pueblo, or jalapeño.
Seasonal guides & gift content, what to eat in chile season, what to give for Easter, Mother’s Day, the holidays, Super Bowl spreads.
Recipe posts, bringing the dishes our family and customers actually make at home onto the site so other home cooks can follow along.
Customer experience, making sure the answers people need (shipping windows, storage, prep) are easy to find before they have to email us.

The through-line is the same as everything else this store does: respect the chile, respect the people growing it, and make it easier for a family two thousand miles away to put real Hatch green chile on the table. When harvest comes around, that means getting fresh Hatch chile peppers shipped from the valley to kitchens across the country.