Pasilla chile

Pasilla is the dried form of the chilaca pepper, a long, slender Capsicum annuum cultivar that turns from dark green to near-black on the plant and then, once sun-dried, develops the deeply wrinkled skin and leathery flex that earned it the diminutive pasilla, from the Spanish pasa meaning raisin. The fresh chilaca is thin-fleshed, ten to twenty-five centimetres long and barely two centimetres wide, with a gentle curve and a pointed tail. Heat sits between 1,000 and 2,500 Scoville units, which is to say barely more than a mild poblano -- the point of this chile was never capsaicin but rather complexity of flavour after drying. The dried pod is almost black, supple enough to bend without snapping when properly stored, and carries a flavour architecture of dried plum, raisin, cocoa, licorice and a whisper of tobacco that no other dried chile in the Mexican pantry quite duplicates. In Oaxacan cuisine pasilla is one of the holy trinity of dried chiles for mole negro alongside chilhuacle negro and mulato; in central Mexico it anchors salsas borrachas and enriches adobos. Confusion reigns outside Mexico because pasilla and ancho are frequently mislabelled in US retail, but the two are botanically and culinarily distinct: ancho is a dried poblano, broad and heart-shaped, where pasilla is the dried chilaca, narrow and elongated.