You are reading the back of a can, or a jar of hot sauce, or a taqueria menu, and the word chipotle is sitting there in the ingredient list. It is not a brand name in that context. It is a specific chile with a specific process behind it, and the short version is that a chipotle is a ripe red jalapeno that has been dried with wood smoke until it is hard, wrinkled and about a tenth of its original weight.
This guide covers the pepper itself: how it is made, the two varieties you will actually run into, how hot it is, how to say the word, where the word came from, what the canned adobo version really contains, and how to cook with all of it. If you came here looking for the restaurant chain, there is a separate guide for that and a link to it in the first paragraph below.
A chipotle is a smoke-dried ripe jalapeno. That is the whole definition, and everything else in this guide is detail hanging off it. The word does double duty in American English, though, because it is also the name of a burrito chain with more than four thousand restaurants, and search results for the two meanings sit right on top of each other. If the restaurant is what you want, read what Chipotle the company actually is instead, or work out the numbers on an order with our Chipotle nutrition calculator. Everything from here down is about the chile.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. People who search for the pepper are usually mid-recipe, holding a can they bought for one dish and wondering what to do with the other six peppers in it. People who search for the chain want hours and prices. Google mixes the two constantly, which is why so many pages about the pepper open with three paragraphs about a restaurant before they get to the point. This one will not.
The Chipotle nutrition calculator builds your order ingredient by ingredient and gives you calories, protein, sodium and carbs before you get to the register.
What this guide covers
Fourteen sections, in the order most people need them. The adobo section and the storage section are the two that actually change how you cook.
The short answer, and the two meanings
A chipotle is a jalapeno that was left on the plant until it turned red, then dried over smoldering wood for several days until almost all the water was gone. It is a preservation method first and a flavoring second, although the flavoring is the reason anybody still bothers. Fresh green jalapenos are grassy and bright. Chipotles are dark, leathery, smoky and slightly sweet, and they taste almost nothing like the pepper they started as.
The transformation is drastic enough that a lot of people do not connect the two at all. Someone can eat jalapenos on nachos every week and buy chipotle powder for chili and never realize they are the same plant, harvested at a different moment and treated very differently afterward. It is roughly the same relationship as grapes to raisins, or plums to prunes, except that smoke is doing half the work.
Now the disambiguation. In the United States, “chipotle” is also the name of a fast casual chain founded in Denver in 1993. That company took its name from this pepper, and the pepper is genuinely present in its kitchens, which is a nicer bit of naming than most restaurant chains manage. We cover the naming story further down in why the restaurant is called Chipotle. If you want the company rather than the chile, the right pages are What Is Chipotle? and Is Chipotle Mexican food?, and the wider set is in the rest of our Chipotle guides.
What it is
A ripe red jalapeno, smoke-dried over wood for days until it holds about six percent moisture. Hard, wrinkled, dark, and shelf stable for a year or more.
What it is not
Not a separate species. Not a hotter pepper than a jalapeno. Not the same thing as ancho, guajillo or pasilla, all of which are different chiles dried without smoke.
How you will meet it
Most often canned in adobo sauce. Also sold whole and dried in Latin grocery stores, and ground into a rust-colored powder sold as chipotle chile powder.
How a jalapeno becomes a chipotle
Start with the harvest decision, because that is where chipotles come from and it explains the price. A jalapeno field is normally picked green. Green is what the fresh market wants, green is what goes into jars of pickled slices, and picking green lets the plant keep setting fruit, so growers get more passes through the field. Peppers left on the plant to ripen do the opposite: they slow the plant down and they bruise, split and spoil far more easily once they are red and soft.
So the red ones tend to be the fruit that got away. Late in the season, or on plants at the end of their productive run, growers stop picking green and let what is left turn. Red jalapenos are also more fragile in transit and have a much shorter shelf life than green ones, which makes them a poor candidate for shipping fresh. Drying them solves that problem, and smoking them solves it in a way that adds something rather than just removing water. That is the practical origin of the chipotle: a way to turn a crop that was about to become a loss into something worth more per pound than the fresh pepper ever was.
Only a small share of any jalapeno harvest ends up going this way. Most of the crop is sold green, and the smoked fraction is a specialty product concentrated in a few growing regions, with Chihuahua in northern Mexico being the best known for the type most Americans buy. That scarcity is one reason chipotles cost what they do. The other reason is the yield. It takes roughly ten pounds of fresh jalapenos to produce one pound of finished chipotles. Water is around 88 percent of a fresh jalapeno by weight, and the drying process takes that down to something like six percent. You are paying for ten peppers every time you buy one.
The smoking, step by step
The jalapenos stay on the bush past the green stage until they turn deep red. This is not a cosmetic choice. Ripening develops sugars and changes the flavor compounds, and a green jalapeno smoked the same way does not become a chipotle. It becomes a smoked green pepper, which is a different and much less interesting thing.
Peppers are picked, sorted for damage, and often left to sit for a day or two so the outside firms up before they go into the smoker. Split or rotting fruit is pulled out, since anything already breaking down will spoil the batch rather than dry with it.
Traditionally the peppers are spread in a single layer on racks inside a closed chamber. A firebox sits outside it, and smoke is drawn in through a duct rather than the fire sitting under the fruit. The point is smoke and gentle warmth, not cooking. Temperatures sit in the range of about 150 to 170 degrees Fahrenheit.
Pecan is the classic fuel in northern Mexico and Texas, with mesquite, oak and fruit woods also used. The wood choice shows up in the finished pepper. Pecan gives the rounded, slightly sweet smoke most people associate with chipotle. Mesquite is sharper and more aggressive.
Somebody has to turn the peppers regularly so they dry evenly and none of them sit wet against the rack. This goes on for several days, commonly around six, until the fruit rattles when you shake it and snaps rather than bends. That labor is the other half of why chipotles are not cheap.
Finished chipotles are graded by color and size. Some are bagged and sold whole and dried. Some are ground into powder. A large share goes straight into canning plants to be rehydrated and packed in adobo sauce, which is the form most American kitchens buy.
Why smoke at all? Sun drying works for thin-walled chiles like guajillo. Jalapenos are thick walled and hold a lot of water, so left in the sun they tend to rot before they dry. Smoke drying moves the water out fast enough to beat the mold, and the smoke itself is mildly antimicrobial. The flavor was a side effect that turned out to be the whole point.
Home smokers can make a passable version of this with a standard offset smoker or a pellet grill held as low as it will go, red jalapenos spread on a rack, and eight to twelve hours of patience with the wood topped up. The results are usually softer and less concentrated than commercial chipotles because household equipment struggles to hold a low temperature for days without cooking the fruit. It is a decent weekend project if you have a glut of red peppers in a garden. It is not a way to save money.
Morita and meco: the two types of chipotle
Here is the thing almost no English-language page tells you. There is not one chipotle. There are two main commercial types, they look different, they taste different, and if a recipe was written in Mexico it may well assume the one you do not have. Knowing which is which is the single fastest upgrade to your cooking with these peppers.
The difference comes from how long the pepper stays in the smoke. Cut the process short and you get a morita, which keeps some moisture, stays pliable, and holds a fruity, raisin-like sweetness under the smoke. Run it long and you get a meco, which dries out completely, turns a dusty gray-brown, and tastes deeply and unmistakably of wood smoke. Same pepper, same technique, different endpoint.
Morita
Morita means “little blackberry” in Spanish, which is a fair description of the color. A morita is smaller than you expect, maybe an inch and a half to two inches long, deep reddish purple, wrinkled but still slightly bendy. Squeeze one and it gives a little. Most morita production is centered in Chihuahua, and almost every chipotle sold in a US supermarket is a morita, including the ones in the can of chipotles in adobo you already own. Moritas are also what goes into most commercial chipotle salsas and hot sauces.
Flavor-wise, moritas lead with fruit. There is smoke, but it sits behind a sweetness that genuinely does read as raisin or prune, with a little tobacco underneath. They rehydrate quickly because they never dried completely in the first place, which is part of why canners like them.
Meco
A meco is the traditionalist’s chipotle and is harder to find outside Mexico. It is bigger, longer and more cigar-shaped, tan to grayish brown, with a dusty matte surface and none of the morita’s give. It is stiff. It rattles. It smells like a campfire from across the room. Mecos are more common in central and southern Mexican home cooking, and many Mexican cooks consider the morita the lesser pepper, sold abroad because it looks prettier and is easier to process.
Mecos are sometimes called chile navideño or chile ahumado depending on the region. If you order dried chipotles online from a specialty chile supplier and the photo shows pale brown peppers rather than dark purple ones, you are looking at mecos. They are worth buying at least once so you understand what the pepper is capable of. Toasted and rehydrated for a table salsa, a meco tastes like nothing else in a supermarket spice aisle.
| Feature | Chipotle morita | Chipotle meco |
|---|---|---|
| Appearance | Small, 1.5 to 2 inches, deep reddish purple, slightly pliable, faintly glossy | Larger, 2 to 3 inches, tan to grayish brown, stiff and dusty, matte surface |
| Time in smoke | Shorter, roughly half the run, so more moisture stays in | Longer, dried out fully, sometimes double the smoking time |
| Smoke character | Present but restrained, sits underneath the fruit | Front and center, woody and campfire-like |
| Flavor | Sweet, fruity, raisin and prune notes, mild tobacco | Earthy, nutty, intensely smoky, drier and more savory |
| Typical use | Canned adobo, commercial salsas, hot sauces, anywhere sweetness helps | Table salsas, stews, adobos in Mexican home kitchens, moles |
| Where it is grown | Mostly Chihuahua, northern Mexico | More widely, with central and southern Mexico as the main market |
| Availability in the US | Common. This is what you have already bought. | Specialty. Latin markets and online chile sellers. |
| Rehydration | Fast, 15 to 20 minutes in hot water | Slower, 30 minutes or more, worth a light toast first |
If a Mexican recipe just says chipotle with no qualifier, it usually means meco. If an American recipe just says chipotle, it almost always means a canned morita in adobo. Swapping one for the other is fine, but expect the meco version to taste noticeably smokier and less sweet, so you may want a pinch of brown sugar or a little more tomato to balance it.
How hot is a chipotle?
Chipotles measure roughly 2,500 to 8,000 Scoville heat units, which is the same range as the jalapeno they came from. That is not a coincidence and it is the fact people get wrong most often.
Smoking and drying do not add capsaicin. The heat compounds were already in the pepper, and the process does not create more of them. What drying does is remove water, so per gram of finished pepper the concentration goes up, and a chipotle can eat hotter than a fresh jalapeno of the same weight simply because there is less pepper flesh diluting it. But a single chipotle and the single jalapeno it used to be carry the same total heat. If someone tells you smoking makes a pepper hotter, they are describing a concentration effect and calling it something it is not.
There is a second thing going on that makes chipotles feel warmer than the numbers suggest. Ripening a jalapeno to red tends to push it toward the upper part of its heat range, because capsaicin accumulates as the fruit matures. So the red peppers chosen for smoking were often already the hotter end of the crop. Combine that with the concentration effect and the practical experience of eating a chipotle lands somewhere north of a fresh green jalapeno, even though the lab number is the same.
| Pepper | Scoville range (SHU) | Relative to a chipotle | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poblano (dried: ancho) | 1,000 – 2,000 | Milder | Mild, earthy, faintly sweet. Very little burn. |
| Jalapeno (fresh, green) | 2,500 – 8,000 | The same on paper | Bright, grassy, sharp heat that fades fast. |
| Chipotle (smoked ripe jalapeno) | 2,500 – 8,000 | Baseline | Smoky and sweet with a heat that builds slowly. |
| Serrano | 10,000 – 23,000 | Two to four times hotter | Clean, immediate, more aggressive than jalapeno. |
| Cayenne | 30,000 – 50,000 | Roughly six to twelve times hotter | Sharp, dry heat with almost no fruit behind it. |
| Habanero | 100,000 – 350,000 | Twenty times hotter or more | Floral and fruity, then a long severe burn. |
For practical purposes, treat one canned chipotle in adobo as a medium-heat ingredient in a dish serving four. One pepper plus a spoon of the sauce gives a pot of chili or a pan of beans a clear warmth without making it a spicy dish. Two peppers is noticeably hot. Four is a dish for people who like heat and will be described as spicy by everybody else. The seeds and the pale internal veins hold most of the capsaicin, so scraping them out before you chop takes a lot of the burn away and leaves the smoke, which is often exactly what you want.
Heat tolerance is personal and inconsistent, and any single pepper can land anywhere in its range depending on the variety, the soil and how stressed the plant was. Treat the numbers as a map, not a measurement of the pepper in your hand. If you are calibrating your tolerance against restaurant food, our write-up on how spicy Chipotle’s carne asada actually is covers what a chipotle-forward marinade tastes like at a scale where the recipe is deliberately kept mild.
How to pronounce chipotle, and how to spell it
Four syllables. chih-POHT-lay. The stress lands on the middle syllable, POHT. The final E is pronounced, and it sounds like “lay”, not like the silent E at the end of an English word.
Broken down slowly: chi as in “chip” but shorter, pot as in the cooking vessel, lay as in “delay”. Run it together and you get chih-POHT-lay. In Spanish the T and the L are cleanly separated, so it is chi-POT-le rather than anything with a “tul” sound in the middle. That separation is the part English speakers most often lose.
The three common mispronunciations
chih-POL-tay
The most frequent one by a wide margin. The T and the L get swapped, which is a normal thing for English speakers to do with an unfamiliar cluster. It also drives the misspelling “chipoltle”, which turns up constantly in search data.
chih-POH-tul
Reading the ending as if it were an English word like “bottle” or “throttle”. Understandable, since that is exactly what the letters look like, but the Spanish ending is “lay” and the vowel is voiced.
chip-OAT-ul
A hybrid of the other two, usually from someone reading the word for the first time and guessing. Once you know the stress goes on the middle syllable, the rest tends to fall into place.
The spelling is worth its own note, because the search data on this word is a small monument to how hard it is. C-H-I-P-O-T-L-E. The T comes before the L. There is no U anywhere in it, there is only one T, and it ends in LE and not EL. The forms people type most often are chipoltle, chipotile, chipolte and chiptole, and they are all the same underlying problem: the brain wants to reorder that final consonant cluster into something English-shaped. If you remember the word is chile plus a syllable for smoke, the T-before-L order sticks better, which brings us to where the word actually came from.
Where the word comes from
Chipotle comes into English from Mexican Spanish, and into Mexican Spanish from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire and still spoken today by well over a million people across central Mexico. The Nahuatl form is usually given as chilpoctli, a compound of chilli, meaning chile pepper, and poctli, meaning smoke. Put together it means, quite literally, smoked chile. There is no metaphor in it. The word is a description of the process, coined by the people who invented the process.
The English word chili comes from the same Nahuatl chilli, as does chocolate from chocolatl, tomato from tomatl, and avocado from ahuacatl. That cluster of loanwords is a decent summary of what the Americas contributed to the world’s pantry. Chipotle is a later arrival in English than the others: dictionaries date its first appearance in written English to around 1950, and it stayed a specialist term in Southwestern cooking for decades after that before the 1990s salsa boom pushed it into general use.
The technique is much older than the word’s arrival in English, and older than the Spanish arrival in Mexico. Smoke drying chiles was already established practice in Mesoamerica before contact, for the same reason it was established practice for fish and meat everywhere else: it was the way to make a seasonal, perishable food last through the year. Central Mexico had, and still has, dozens of named dried chiles, each one a specific fresh pepper put through a specific drying method. Ancho is a dried poblano. Guajillo is a dried mirasol. Pasilla is a dried chilaca. Chipotle is a smoked, dried jalapeno, and it sits inside that system rather than standing outside it.
It is worth saying plainly that this is Indigenous Mexican food technology, not a Tex-Mex invention or a marketing idea from the 1990s. The peppers, the smoking, the adobo and the vocabulary all come from Mexico, and the American food industry adopted them relatively recently. That history is part of why the question of what counts as authentic gets complicated when a chain borrows the name, which we take on directly in our honest answer on whether Chipotle is Mexican food.
What chipotles in adobo actually are
This is the form nearly everyone meets first: a squat seven-ounce can, usually with a red label, holding maybe six to eight dark peppers packed in a thick rust-red sauce. It costs a couple of dollars in most supermarkets and sits in the Latin foods aisle next to the dried chiles. Recipes call for “one chipotle in adobo, minced, plus a teaspoon of the sauce” and then leave you with a can that has been opened, which is the single most common chipotle problem in American home cooking. We will fix that in the storage section.
Adobo is a Spanish word for a marinade or seasoning paste, and it long predates its use with chipotles. In this case the adobo is a cooked sauce built on tomato and vinegar, and the chipotles in the can are dried peppers that have been rehydrated and then simmered in it. The sauce is not a packing liquid the way brine is in a jar of olives. It is a genuine ingredient, and in most cases it is the more useful half of the can.
What is in the sauce
The base
Tomato, usually as puree or paste, providing body, color and a background sweetness. Vinegar, most often a cider or white vinegar, which brightens the whole thing and does most of the preserving work. Water or the chile soaking liquid to thin it.
The seasoning
Onion and garlic, cooked down. Mexican oregano and cumin in small amounts. Salt, and usually a little sugar to balance the vinegar. Some commercial versions add ground dried chiles, paprika, or a touch of oil. Ingredient lists vary by brand, so check the can if you are avoiding something specific.
Brands differ more than you would expect. Some are tomato-forward and mild. Some are vinegar-sharp. Some are noticeably hotter than others because the manufacturer left more seed in. If you have tried chipotles in adobo once and did not love them, it is worth trying a second brand before writing the ingredient off. Mexican brands sold in Latin markets tend to be smokier and less sweet than the mass-market American ones.
How to use the peppers and how to use the sauce
Treat them as two ingredients. The whole peppers are the heat and the texture: mince one finely and it disappears into a sauce while leaving smoke and burn behind. The adobo itself is milder, sweeter and much easier to dose, and a tablespoon of it stirred into something is often all a dish needs. When a recipe seems too spicy for your household, use the sauce alone and skip the pepper entirely. You keep almost all the flavor and lose most of the heat.
A few things the sauce is very good at, none of which involve a Mexican dish. Whisk a spoonful into mayonnaise for a sandwich spread. Stir it into ketchup for burger sauce. Add it to a barbecue sauce that is too sweet. Blend it into a vinaigrette with lime and honey. Whisk it into softened butter with lime zest and put that on corn or a steak. Once you stop thinking of it as a taco ingredient it becomes one of the most useful things in the refrigerator door.
A note on wearing gloves. Capsaicin does not wash off with water and it will stay on your fingers for hours. If you mince several chipotles, wear gloves or wash with dish soap and a little oil afterward, and keep your hands away from your eyes and anybody else’s face until you are sure. This is a bigger deal with dried chiles than fresh ones because the residue is concentrated.
What a chipotle tastes like
Smoke first. That is always the opening note, and depending on the wood it reads as campfire, bacon, or the inside of a barbecue lid. It arrives before anything else and it is the thing that makes chipotle immediately recognizable in a dish even when you cannot name it.
Then sweetness, and this is the part people are not expecting. A good chipotle, especially a morita, tastes distinctly of dried fruit. Raisin is the closest single word. Prune is close too, and some people get fig or date. That sweetness is real, not a trick of the smoke, and it comes from the sugars that developed while the pepper ripened red on the plant and then concentrated as the water left.
Then the heat, and it arrives late. A fresh jalapeno hits your tongue quickly and fades. A chipotle takes its time, building over ten or fifteen seconds and settling into a warm ache at the back of the throat that lingers a good while. This slow arrival is why people underestimate chipotles and add a third pepper before the first two have registered.
Under all of it there is an earthy, slightly bitter, tobacco-and-leather quality, most obvious in mecos. It is the same family of flavors you get in a good dark chile paste or a mole, and it is what gives chipotle-seasoned food a savory depth rather than just heat. Words that genuinely help when you are describing this to someone: smoky, leathery, raisiny, earthy, warm. Words that do not help: spicy, which tells them nothing, and smoky on its own, which is only a third of the picture.
A useful test. Put a pinch of chipotle powder on your tongue with nothing else. You will get the smoke immediately, then a sweetness you would not predict from the smell, then a burn that keeps growing for about twenty seconds after you thought it had peaked. Doing that once teaches you more about dosing chipotle than any recipe will.
How to cook with chipotles
Chipotles come in three forms and they are not interchangeable in quantity, which trips people up constantly. Here is what each one is for and roughly how much to start with.
| Form | What it is | Start with | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canned in adobo | Rehydrated whole peppers in tomato and vinegar sauce, 7 oz can | 1 pepper plus 1 tsp sauce per 4 servings, or 1 tbsp sauce alone | Chili, braises, marinades, mayo, sauces, anything wet |
| Whole dried | Hard smoked pods, sold loose or bagged, morita or meco | 2 pods per pot of stew, toasted then rehydrated | Salsas, stocks, stews, adobos you build yourself |
| Powder | Ground dried chipotle, sometimes blended with other spices | 1/2 tsp per pound of meat in a rub, then adjust | Dry rubs, seasoning blends, eggs, popcorn, roast vegetables |
| Chipotle paste | Blended chipotles and aromatics in a tube or jar | 1 tsp per 4 servings | Fast weeknight seasoning where you want no texture |
Rehydrating whole dried chipotles
The technique takes ten minutes of attention and it is worth learning, because whole dried chipotles are cheaper per pepper than canned and taste better in anything you blend.
Dried chiles pick up dust in storage. A dry cloth or a damp paper towel is enough. Soaking them under a running tap before you toast them makes them steam rather than toast.
Dry skillet over medium heat, or a hot oven for a minute or two. You want them fragrant and slightly puffed. Do not let them darken. Burnt chile is bitter in a way you cannot cook out, and 15 seconds is the difference.
Cover with hot water from the kettle and weigh them down with a small plate so they stay under. Moritas soften in about 20 minutes. Mecos want 30 or more. They should be pliable and leathery, not mushy.
Sometimes it is smoky and sweet and makes a better base for your sauce than plain water. Sometimes it is bitter, especially if the chiles were older or you toasted them a shade too far. Taste, then decide. This is the step most recipes skip.
Pull the stem, slit the pepper and scrape the seeds and pale veins out for less heat, or leave them for more. Blend with a little of the soaking liquid until smooth. That puree keeps a week in the refrigerator and freezes well.
Dishes where chipotle genuinely works
Chili and bean pots. One minced pepper and a spoon of adobo does more for a pot of black beans than any amount of chili powder. Add it early so the smoke has time to distribute.
Braised pork and beef. Chipotle is the backbone of a lot of Mexican adobo marinades, and it holds up to long cooking better than most fresh chiles. Barbacoa and birria style braises both take it well.
Marinades for grilled meat. Blended with garlic, cumin, oregano, citrus and a little oil, chipotle makes the kind of marinade that gets used on steak and chicken at scale. This is more or less the family of recipe behind the marinade on Chipotle’s steak.
Creamy sauces. Chipotle crema, chipotle mayo, chipotle ranch. Dairy and fat blunt the burn and carry the smoke, which makes this the friendliest way to introduce the flavor to somebody cautious about spice.
Soups. Tortilla soup, corn chowder, black bean soup, roasted tomato soup. A half teaspoon of powder in a pot of squash soup changes it completely for almost no effort.
Eggs and breakfast food. Powder on scrambled eggs or in a breakfast hash. It behaves like smoked paprika with a kick, and it pairs unusually well with sweet potato.
Anything you would put barbecue sauce on. Chipotle is the smoke in a lot of commercial barbecue sauces. Adding a spoonful of adobo to a bottled sauce covers up a lot of sins.
Roasted vegetables. Cauliflower, sweet potato, carrots, corn. Toss with oil, chipotle powder and salt before roasting. The sweetness in the vegetable meets the sweetness in the chile.
Two recipes with real quantities
The first makes the canned product from scratch and is worth doing once so you understand what is in the can. The second takes five minutes and is the thing you will actually make repeatedly.
Homemade chipotles in adobo
Makes roughly two cups, or about three supermarket cans worth. Keeps three to four weeks refrigerated in a clean jar.
You need: 18 to 20 dried chipotle morita chiles. 1 Roma tomato. Half a white onion. 2 cloves garlic. 3 tablespoons cider vinegar. 1 teaspoon salt. Half a teaspoon brown sugar. Half a teaspoon Mexican oregano. A quarter teaspoon ground cumin. About 1 cup water, part of it the chile soaking liquid. A tablespoon of neutral oil. Black pepper.
Wipe the chiles clean. Toast them in a 400°F oven for 1 to 2 minutes, watching closely. Cover with hot water and soak 20 to 30 minutes until pliable. While they soak, roast the whole tomato at 400°F for 20 to 30 minutes until collapsed and a little charred.
Pull the stems and seeds from 6 or 7 of the soaked chiles and blend those with the roasted tomato, a quarter of the onion, one garlic clove, the brown sugar and half a cup of water or soaking liquid. Blend until smooth. Set the remaining whole chiles aside, still stemmed but intact.
Dice the rest of the onion and cook it in the oil over medium heat until soft, about 6 minutes. Add the second garlic clove minced, the oregano, cumin, salt and a few grinds of black pepper. Cook one more minute until it smells like something.
Pour in the chile puree, the vinegar, another quarter cup of water and the reserved whole chiles. Simmer gently 10 to 15 minutes until it thickens to the consistency of a loose ketchup. Taste and adjust salt, vinegar and sugar. It should be sharp, smoky and slightly sweet all at once.
Cool, then transfer to a clean jar with the whole peppers submerged in the sauce. Refrigerate. This is not a shelf-stable canning recipe and should be treated as a refrigerator product.
Chipotle crema, five minutes
Makes about a cup. This is the recipe that converts people who think they do not like chipotle.
You need: 1 cup sour cream or Mexican crema, or half sour cream and half mayonnaise for a richer version. 1 chipotle in adobo, stem removed. 2 teaspoons of the adobo sauce. 1 clove garlic. Juice of half a lime. A quarter teaspoon salt. A tablespoon of water to loosen.
Put everything in a blender or small food processor and run it until it is smooth and evenly pink-orange. If you want it milder, leave the whole pepper out and use only the adobo sauce, starting with two teaspoons and adding more to taste. If you want it hotter, use two peppers. Let it sit twenty minutes before serving if you can, because the garlic and the smoke both need a little time to spread through the dairy.
Use it on tacos, grilled corn, roasted potatoes, fish, black bean bowls, or as a dip for tortilla chips. It keeps five days refrigerated. If you are building a burrito bowl at home, this plus rice, beans and a grilled protein gets you most of the way to a restaurant version, and our step-by-step on how to make a Chipotle burrito at home covers the rest of the components.
How to store them, including the leftover can problem
Whole dried chipotles keep for a long time if you keep them dry and dark. An airtight container or a zip bag with the air pressed out, in a cupboard away from the stove, will hold them in good shape for a year and usable shape for considerably longer. They do not spoil in a dangerous way. They fade. An old chipotle loses its smoke and its fruit and turns dusty and one-dimensional, and it will also have gone brittle enough to shatter rather than bend. If you buy a large bag and will not get through it in six months, freeze the rest in a sealed bag and take them out as needed.
Chipotle powder has a shorter useful life than whole pods, because grinding exposes far more surface area and the volatile smoke compounds leave faster. Six months in a tightly closed jar out of the light is a reasonable expectation. Anything older is not unsafe, it is just weak, and you will find yourself doubling the quantity to get the same effect.
The leftover adobo problem, and the fix
This is the most useful practical thing in this whole guide, so it gets its own section. You open a can for one pepper. The rest sits in the refrigerator in the open can, gets covered with foil, gets pushed to the back, and three weeks later it goes in the trash. Almost everyone does this. It is why people think they do not use chipotles much when in fact they use one every few weeks and waste seven.
Peppers and sauce together, straight into a small blender or food processor. Run it until it is a smooth paste. You now have a uniform product you can measure by the spoonful instead of fishing out individual peppers and guessing.
One tablespoon per well is about right and matches how recipes call for it. A standard tray will take a whole 7 oz can with room to spare. A silicone tray makes them easier to pop out later.
Once solid, transfer the cubes to a labeled freezer bag. They will not freeze rock hard because of the vinegar and the oil content, so they stay slightly yielding and are easy to break apart.
Drop a cube into a pot of chili, a pan of beans, a marinade or a slow cooker. There is no need to thaw it. For a crema or a mayo, microwave one cube for ten seconds first. They keep six months in the freezer without any real quality loss.
If freezing is not an option, transfer the leftovers out of the metal can into a small glass jar, press the peppers under the sauce, and add a thin film of oil on top. That will hold in the refrigerator for two to three weeks. Never store an opened can in the can itself for more than a day or two. The acid in the adobo reacts with the exposed metal and you will get a metallic edge on the flavor, which is unpleasant and not fixable.
Substitutes if you cannot find them
None of these are exact. Chipotle is a fairly specific combination of smoke, fruit and slow heat, and everything below gets you two out of three at best. Ranked by how close they land.
| Substitute | Use this much | What you gain and lose |
|---|---|---|
| Chipotle powder | 1/2 to 1 tsp for each canned pepper | The closest by far, same chile. You lose the moisture, the tomato and the vinegar, so add a teaspoon of tomato paste and a splash of vinegar if the recipe relied on the adobo. |
| Smoked paprika plus cayenne | 1 tsp smoked paprika plus a pinch of cayenne per pepper | Gets the smoke and the heat separately. Missing the fruit and the depth, and paprika smoke reads sweeter and less woody. Fine in a rub, obvious in a salsa. |
| Ancho chile plus liquid smoke | 1 rehydrated ancho plus 2 or 3 drops liquid smoke | Ancho brings the raisin sweetness, liquid smoke brings the smoke. Use the smoke sparingly, since it is very easy to overshoot into something that tastes artificial. |
| Chipotle hot sauce | 1 to 2 tsp per pepper, then reduce other liquid | Right flavor family, but much more vinegar and salt. Works in marinades and dressings, less good in dry applications. |
| Guajillo or pasilla | 1 to 2 pods, rehydrated | Good chile depth and mild fruit, but no smoke at all. Pair with a little smoked salt or smoked paprika to close the gap. |
| Fresh jalapeno | 1 per pepper, charred until blistered | Same species, right heat, wrong flavor. Charring on an open flame gets you a hint of the right direction. Use only when heat is what the recipe needed. |
Where to find the real thing if your regular store does not carry it: a Latin American grocery will have both the cans and the dried pods, usually cheaper than a supermarket. Larger supermarkets keep the cans in the international or Latin aisle rather than with the spices, which is where most people look first and fail. Online chile specialists are the only reliable source for mecos in most of the country.
Why the restaurant is called Chipotle
Since it is the second question people ask on this page, here is the answer with the caveat that the full company story lives on our guide to what Chipotle is.
Steve Ells opened the first Chipotle in Denver in 1993, in a converted ice cream shop near the University of Denver campus. He had trained at the Culinary Institute of America and had worked in a fine dining kitchen in San Francisco, and the original plan was for the burrito place to fund a proper restaurant later. The name came from the pepper because the pepper was in the food. Chipotle-based adobo marinades were part of the original recipes and remain part of them today, which makes the name a description of a cooking method rather than a decorative Spanish word chosen to sound authentic.
That marinade is still where the pepper shows up most clearly on the menu. The steak and chicken both go through a chipotle-forward adobo before they hit the grill, and the carne asada carries a different but related seasoning. We go into the composition of both in the steak guide and in the carne asada write-up, and the full protein lineup is compared in what meats Chipotle has. If you have ever wondered why the chicken tastes smoky rather than just spicy, the chipotle in the adobo is the reason.
One consequence of the naming worth flagging: the company’s success has made it very hard to search for the pepper. Type chipotle into a search engine and you get store hours, a stock price and a nutrition menu long before you get a chile. That is a real problem for cooks, and it is why pages like this one exist. It also means that in casual American speech, “chipotle” now most often means the restaurant, and you may need to say “chipotle pepper” or “chipotle chile” to be understood.
The chain is company-operated in the United States and does not franchise, which is unusual for a chain of its size and is part of why the recipes are consistent between locations. If you want the menu and price side of that story, start with what Chipotle has on the menu and what to order.
Nutrition and what is actually in a chipotle
A chipotle is a dried pepper, so on its own it contributes very little in the way of calories to anything. A single canned chipotle in adobo weighs somewhere around 15 to 20 grams including the sauce clinging to it, and lands in the region of 5 to 10 calories. Even a heavy hand puts you under 40 calories for a dish serving four. The sodium is the only number worth watching, because the adobo is salted and vinegary and commercial cans vary a lot between brands. Check the label if you are tracking sodium carefully.
Peppers in general carry vitamin C, vitamin A precursors and various carotenoids, though drying reduces vitamin C substantially since it is heat sensitive. Capsaicin, the compound responsible for the heat, has been studied for a long list of possible effects and the honest summary is that the research is mixed, mostly conducted at doses far above what anyone eats on a taco, and not a reason to change your diet. Eat chipotles because they taste good. For actual per-ingredient numbers on any food, the USDA FoodData Central database, linked at the foot of this page, is the reference to use rather than any recipe site, including this one.
Where chipotle does earn its keep nutritionally is indirect. It is a way to make low-fat, low-sodium cooking taste like something. A pot of plain black beans with a chipotle and a squeeze of lime does not need much salt or fat to be worth eating, and the same trick works on roasted vegetables, plain chicken breast and brown rice. That is a more useful claim than anything about metabolism.
If the reason you landed here is calorie counting on a restaurant meal rather than a home recipe, the numbers you want are elsewhere. Our nutrition calculator builds a full order, the calorie breakdown covers typical bowls and burritos, and the vegetarian guide handles the meatless side. For the comparison people ask about most often, our CAVA calorie calculator does the same job for the Mediterranean equivalent.
Rough numbers per canned pepper
Around 5 to 10 calories, close to zero fat, 1 to 2 grams of carbohydrate, and a variable amount of sodium depending on the brand. A tablespoon of the adobo sauce is broadly similar. These are approximations and labels differ.
What to check on the label
Sodium per serving, since it is the one number that can be meaningful. Also scan for added sugar and any oil, both of which some brands include and some do not. Ingredient lists on Mexican brands are often shorter.
Chipotle pepper questions, answered
The questions people actually type, with answers that do not make you scroll.
Is a chipotle just a smoked jalapeno?
Yes, with two qualifications that matter. It has to be a jalapeno that was left on the plant until it ripened red, and it has to be smoke dried rather than just smoked. A green jalapeno run through a smoker for an hour is a smoked jalapeno, not a chipotle. The real process takes several days over smoldering hardwood and removes almost all the water, taking the pepper from about 88 percent moisture down to roughly six percent. That drying is what creates the leathery texture and the concentrated raisin sweetness people recognize.
How hot is a chipotle pepper compared to a jalapeno?
On paper they are identical, both sitting at roughly 2,500 to 8,000 Scoville heat units, because smoking does not add capsaicin. In practice a chipotle often eats hotter for two reasons. Drying removes the water, so per gram of finished pepper the heat is more concentrated. And jalapenos left to ripen red tend to land at the upper end of their heat range, and red fruit is exactly what gets smoked. So the same pepper, more concentrated and picked later, feels warmer even though the total heat is unchanged.
How do you pronounce chipotle?
Four syllables, chih-POHT-lay, with the stress on the middle syllable. The final E is pronounced and sounds like the word lay, not like a silent English E. Say chi as in chip, then pot as in cooking pot, then lay as in delay, and run them together. The most common mistake is swapping the T and the L to get chih-POL-tay, which is also where the frequent misspelling chipoltle comes from. The spelling is C H I P O T L E, with the T before the L.
What does chipotle mean?
It means smoked chile, literally. The word comes into English through Mexican Spanish from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire, where the form is usually given as chilpoctli. That is a compound of chilli, meaning chile pepper, and poctli, meaning smoke. English picked the word up relatively late, with dictionaries dating its first written appearance to around 1950, though the smoke drying technique itself is far older than the Spanish arrival in Mexico and predates the word’s journey into English by centuries.
What is the difference between morita and meco chipotles?
Time in the smoker. A morita is pulled early, so it keeps some moisture, stays slightly pliable and turns a dark reddish purple. It tastes fruity and sweet with restrained smoke, and it is what almost every American can of chipotles in adobo contains. A meco is smoked much longer, dries out completely and turns tan or grayish brown with a dusty matte surface. It tastes far smokier, earthier and more savory. Mecos are common in Mexican home cooking and hard to find outside specialty stores in the United States.
What are chipotles in adobo?
Dried chipotles that have been rehydrated and simmered in a cooked sauce built on tomato and vinegar, then canned. The adobo also carries onion, garlic, Mexican oregano, cumin, salt and usually a little sugar, with the exact recipe varying quite a bit between brands. Treat the peppers and the sauce as two separate ingredients. The whole peppers carry most of the heat, while the sauce is milder, sweeter and much easier to dose, so using the sauce alone gives you most of the flavor with far less burn.
How do I store leftover chipotles in adobo?
Blend the whole can, peppers and sauce together, into a smooth paste. Spoon it into an ice cube tray at about one tablespoon per well, freeze until solid, then transfer the cubes to a labeled freezer bag. They keep six months and go straight from frozen into a pot with no thawing. If you would rather not freeze, move the leftovers into a glass jar with the peppers pressed under the sauce and use them within two or three weeks. Never leave an opened can in the refrigerator, since the acid reacts with the metal.
Why are chipotles more expensive than fresh jalapenos?
Two reasons, and both are about yield. It takes roughly ten pounds of fresh jalapenos to make one pound of finished chipotles, because water is around 88 percent of the fresh pepper and nearly all of it has to come out. On top of that, only a small share of any jalapeno crop is left on the plant to ripen red, since growers get more fruit and easier shipping by picking green. Add several days of smoking that has to be tended by hand and the price difference stops being surprising.
What can I use instead of chipotle peppers?
Chipotle powder is the closest by a wide margin, since it is the same chile. Use half a teaspoon to a teaspoon for each canned pepper, plus a little tomato paste and vinegar if the recipe was relying on the adobo. After that, smoked paprika with a pinch of cayenne covers the smoke and heat separately but misses the fruit. A rehydrated ancho with two or three drops of liquid smoke gets you the sweetness and the smoke from different directions. Nothing matches it exactly.
Why is the restaurant called Chipotle?
Steve Ells named the first location, opened in Denver in 1993, after the pepper because the pepper was already in the food. Chipotle-based adobo marinades were part of the original recipes and they still season the steak and chicken today, so the name describes a cooking method rather than being a Spanish word picked for atmosphere. One side effect is that the chain has made the pepper almost impossible to search for. You now often have to say chipotle pepper or chipotle chile to be understood.
What does a chipotle taste like?
Smoke arrives first, reading as campfire or barbecue depending on the wood, which is usually pecan. Then a sweetness that surprises people, closest to raisin or prune, left over from the sugars that developed while the pepper ripened red. Then the heat, which is slow. It builds over ten or fifteen seconds and settles into a warm ache rather than the quick sharp hit of a fresh jalapeno. Underneath all of it sits an earthy, leathery, faintly tobacco-like depth that is strongest in meco chipotles.
Can I make chipotles at home?
You can make a reasonable approximation with a smoker or pellet grill held as low as it will go, red jalapenos spread in a single layer, and eight to twelve hours of keeping the wood topped up. Pecan is the traditional fuel. The result is usually softer and less concentrated than a commercial chipotle, because home equipment struggles to hold a low steady temperature for the several days the real process takes without cooking the fruit instead of drying it. It is a good project, not a way to save money.
The quick version
A chipotle is a ripe red jalapeno that has been smoke dried over wood for several days until it holds almost no water. It is not a separate species and it is not hotter than a jalapeno, at 2,500 to 8,000 Scoville units, though drying concentrates it and makes it feel warmer. Say it chih-POHT-lay. The word is Nahuatl for smoked chile. Two types exist: the fruity purple morita, which is what your can of chipotles in adobo contains, and the drier, smokier tan meco you will mostly find in Mexican markets. Adobo is a tomato and vinegar sauce, and the sauce is often more useful than the peppers.
If the reason you looked this up was a restaurant rather than a recipe, the company side is covered in what Chipotle is, whether it counts as Mexican food and what is on the menu, with order-building numbers in the Chipotle nutrition calculator and the flour tortilla question answered in the tortilla guide. There is more in our full set of Chipotle guides, and the rest of the free calculators on Waldev cover everything from nutrition to mortgages.
Everything here about chile heat, cooking times and quantities is a starting point rather than a rule. Scoville ranges are wide and any individual pepper can land anywhere inside them depending on variety, growing conditions and how long it sat in the smoker, so taste as you go and add heat gradually. Commercial adobo recipes differ by brand, so check the can if you are avoiding a specific ingredient or watching sodium. Nothing on this page is medical or dietary advice, and capsaicin can irritate the skin and eyes, so handle dried chiles with care and keep them away from children and pets.
Sources and further reading
fdc.nal.usda.gov is the federal nutrient database and the right place to look up calories, sodium and micronutrients for peppers and for any packaged food.
usda.gov publishes crop production and vegetable market data, including the pepper harvest figures behind how much of a jalapeno crop is sold fresh.
fda.gov sets the labeling rules for canned goods, which is why the ingredient list on a can of chipotles in adobo is the authority on what is in it.
chipotle.com lists current ingredients and allergens for the restaurant chain that took its name from this pepper, including which items carry the adobo marinade.
