{"id":65315,"date":"2020-01-06T14:39:52","date_gmt":"2020-01-06T21:39:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/what-is-colorados-most-iconic-food-the-winner-is\/"},"modified":"2020-01-06T21:39:52","modified_gmt":"2020-01-06T21:39:52","slug":"what-is-colorados-most-iconic-food-the-winner-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/what-is-colorados-most-iconic-food-the-winner-is\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Colorado\u2019s most iconic food? The winner is …"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Victor
Victor Nu\u00f1oz serves up a dish featuring his green chile in Cortez.<\/span>The Journal file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Philadelphia has the cheesesteak. New York can claim bagels and a pizza-style. They have barbeque in Kansas City. But, which food represents Colorado? It was a delicious competition that touched off more than a few fun arguments.<\/p>\n

There were too many choices and zero agreement, so we turned to you.<\/p>\n

Out of eight tasty choices, and three rounds of voting, you chose green chile and the wearer of the Colorado food crown<\/a>. In fact, you did more than choose \u2014 you anointed. Nearly 70 percent of all votes cast for the state\u2019s most iconic food were cast for green chile.<\/p>\n

Rocky Mountain Oysters? Nope. Cheeseburgers? Sorry, \u2018fraid not. Denver omelet? Get outta here. Beer!? Well\u2026 it was a good run, but no. Mean green is the one.<\/p>\n

Now, we also heard that green chile is a New Mexico thing, not a Colorado thing. Perhaps you\u2019ve heard about the green chile feud between the two states?<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like New Mexico has owned green chile for decades. I mean, it\u2019s on their license plates,\u201d said Bryan Bechtold of Denver. \u201cThey even have an official state question: Do you want red or green chile on your food? So, I never really associated that with Colorado.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, here we are. The voters love green chile \u2014 in fact, they chose it over beer of all things! Denverite Layla Gallardo can trace her ancestry back 14 generations in Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico and to green chile.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a part of our DNA because my ancestry is Mexican and Spanish and Tewa Pueblo, and with that, we have this whole culture of cultural foods,\u201d Gallardo said. \u201cWe just have specific foods here in Colorado that you\u2019ll only find here in Southern Colorado, Northern New Mexico.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael Bartolo, a vegetable crop specialist at Colorado State University\u2019s Rocky Ford Station, has spent most of his life improving on the Pueblo chile varietal. He\u2019s credited with breeding today\u2019s Mosco Chile. The difference with the venerable Hatch is in the spiciness of the pepper and its thicker walls.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve grown up around the Pueblo chile, and what I say is, it\u2019s kind of like apples and oranges,\u201d Bartolo said. \u201cSome people prefer one type, some prefer the other. Everybody\u2019s got a way of making things. So, it\u2019s really hard to compare. And I grew up with the Pueblo chile and so, you know, maybe I prefer that, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s necessarily better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gallardo said it doesn\u2019t really matter if it\u2019s New Mexico or Colorado.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re originally from this area,\u201d she said, \u201cif you\u2019re a Chicano, if you\u2019re a Mexican\u2026 What I would say is that we\u2019re all the same people, and it\u2019s the same cultural foods.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, people from all over Colorado and New Mexico with different backgrounds love green chile, including current Gov. Jared Polis and former Gov. John Hickenlooper.<\/p>\n

Gallardo is proud to share the food that means so much to her.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that it\u2019s great that other people like our food, and that we\u2019re able to share that with them,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause if you look at the history of Southern Colorado, Hispanos, Chicanos, Mexicans, indigenous people, we are very much apart of this state. Like we didn\u2019t cross the border, it crossed us here.\u201d<\/p>\n

With border crossings and the mixing of cultures, green chile has changed over time and taken on influences from other cooking traditions.<\/p>\n

\u201cItalian migrants came to Pueblo in the early 20th century to mine coal. And there they encountered the chile. Their Hispanic neighbors were eating chilies and they would take the ingredients, all of the flavors and all these cultures and kind of smash them together,\u201d said Sam Bock, a historian at History Colorado.<\/p>\n

One thing\u2019s for sure, you\u2019d be hardpressed to find green chile stew anywhere else in the country.<\/p>\n

Are you curious about something in the Centennial State? Ask us a question via Colorado Wonders and we\u2019ll try to find the answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

trumps microbrews in informal survey<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":65316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[120,438,28],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-65315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-colorado","tag-food","tag-headlines"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65315"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=65315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}