Food Notes: 2/10
Jalapeño peppers, too too much corn, Pepsi scams, McDonald's Caviar, and so much more!
It was Super Bowl weekend! I didn’t watch the big game, but I did make Jalapeño Poppers.
If this sounds like something you’ve heard me talk about before, you’re absolutely right, I made poppers last year. That discussion focused on supply chain issues causing the price of cream cheese to rise and the inevitable decline of the heat in Jalapeño peppers, but we didn’t really talk much about the history of poppers. So that got me thinking—
Poppers are a relatively recent innovation, made popular around the same time mozzarella sticks entered the market in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but they evolved from a much older Mexican dish.
Snack-sized stuffed peppers first show up in the 1950s, according to Doug Mack at Saveur, but these were far from the poppers we know today. Back then, Jalapeño peppers were stuffed with cheese, but also sardines and fish.
In Food Americana, David Page explains the popper’s nearest culinary relative is a Mexican dish known as chile rellenos. These roasted and stuffed poblano peppers are fried with batter and served with a tomato and onion sauce, and generally considered a main dish rather than an appetizer.
Candolin Cook, writing in The Bite, notes that as early as the 1890s, Luna’s in San Francisco began serving “chili reinas” using bell peppers. Cook also tells the story of how the related dish, chiles en nogada are said to have been invented by nuns at a Santa Mónica convent in 1821. These meat-stuffed peppers could be a culinary cousin of the rellenos – if only the story of the nuns could be proven. Most historians discredit this account.
Either way, Mexico has been stuffing food inside peppers for centuries, but the dishes grew popular in the United States in places like New Mexico as early as the 1930s where Chili rellenos has become a big part of local cuisine. While traditional New Mexico recipes include stuffed cheese, not everyone agrees on the traditional style batter. Today, chefs in the state are mixing things up again, reinventing the dish with fillings like brisket and creamy chicken.
As for poppers, the 1960s and 1970s saw an increasing interest from American consumers for Tex-Mex cuisine. Americans began to accept spicier foods opening up new possibilities and recipes for stuffed peppers began showing up in newspapers in the 1970s, including for chile rellenos and even pablanos.
Cooks were taking risks in those days. For instance, in 1972 there’s a recipe for “Pizza Peppers,” using bell peppers and deviled ham with ketchup and mozzarella cheese.
Among the other abominations from this period, recipes for stuffed Jalapeño peppers appear, like one in the Garden City Telegram (Kansas) from 1978 that calls for stuffing the peppers with cream cheese and salmon, shrimp, or tuna.
It wasn’t until 1992 that a trademark was filed for the term popper, but by then the phrase was already in use. By 1995, poppers could be found at places like Applebee’s and TGI Friday’s, with the latter selling frozen versions in grocery store freezers. They were part of the fried finger food crave evolving in the 1980s including onion rings, the blooming onion, mozzarella sticks, buffalo wings, and various types of egg rolls.
Like most restaurant appetizers, popper prices have gone sky high in recent years. A cheaper option is looking in the freezer section of your local grocery store. Making them from scratch on the other hand, takes a lot of time and costs a lot more, but I’m not one to let efficiency stand in the way of a tasty bite.
I did a quick search for recipes and found that many people now like to wrap a strip of bacon around their popper like it’s a cheap date filled with blue cheese. Wrapping bacon around the popper seemed like it would be cumbersome to eat, so I chose instead to include cooked bacon in the filling, a choice that resulted in a truly savory flavor.
Another thing to note is that there are two ways of preparing the pepper. Either the top can be popped off and filling shoved inside, or they can be sliced lengthwise to create something more akin to the potato skin. Since I wasn’t planning on deep frying them, I went with the lengthwise slice, which overall I think creates less of a threat to molten lava burning cheese scorching the interior of your mouth.
Gourmet Baked Jalapeño Poppers
These definitely cost more than buying a box of processed frozen poppers, but who's keeping track of these things anyway.
INGREDIENTS
8 to 10 fat Jalapeño peppers
3 strips of bacon
6 oz cream cheese
4 oz cheddar cheese
Dash of garlic powder
Dash of onion powder
Dash of paprika
Splash of lemon juice
1 cup breadcrumbs
INSTRUTCTIONS
Finely chop the bacon into itsy bitsy pieces
Fry the bacon up nice and crispy
Reserve the bacon in a bowl and set aside to cool. It must be allowed to cool down or it will melt the filling before you fill your poppers
Shred your cheddar
Combine the cheddar and cream cheese with a fork. It helps if you bring the cream cheese to room temperature. It’s more helpful if it is warm in your apartment.
Squirt a splash of lemon juice to loosen
Add spices and stir some more
Consider using a hand mixer but think its probably not worth it at this point
Once the bacon is cool, stir into the mixture
Slice the peppers in half to create two equal, long peppers. Arrange the pepper to get two even sides
Remove the innards of the pepper. Leave a few seeds for heat, with caution.
Fill each pepper half with the cream cheese mixture
Coat the cheese with the breadcrumbs
Bake at 375F for about 15 to 20 minutes
For a little extra color, raise temperature to 400F for the final few minutes
BONUS: Leftover Sour Cream Popper Dip
Since I had a little extra sour cream, I mixed up a batch of dip for the poppers, but this isn't really necessary, but I did get to serve it in this nifty tomato bowl. You might even call it my super bowl.
INGREDIENTS
Big fat scoop of sour cream
Dash of garlic powder
Dash of onion powder
Dash of paprika
Splash of lemon juice
Three old scallions
INSTRUCTIONS
Combine sour cream, spices, and lemon juice
Stir vigorously
Finely chop the scallions and add to the sauce
Serve alongside poppers, also good on Chili.
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