The chile has been in for some weeks now, to be honest. The chile that you can buy in bushel burlap bags and get roasted at your friendly chile outlet, has been available since about the second week in August down here in SE New Mexico.
I grew up mostly in Los Angeles, where we did not have this. I resent that, in retrospect. Chile season is cool in lots of ways.
When I first started buying these bushels of chile and putting them up, they were running around $13 apiece. This year they are $20. So it goes.
You buy them from a grocery store that wants to work with it. The grocery store must be willing to obtain a chile roaster and staff it with people to roast the chile. Also, it's helpful, in our hot August sun, to put out chairs and a big umbrella for the chile purchasers to sit under while the chile is roasted. Oh, and a chair of course for the chile roaster guy, too!
A chile roaster (the device, not the guy) is a big rotating cylinder with a screened portal on a hinge, with a set of adjustable gas jets that send up their flames into the cylinder, which turns with the bushel of chile inside. The good chile roasters understand how to do it right. That means you heat the skins enough to separate them fully from the chile, and also roast the chile until done, but do not burn the chile or leave it with skins attached.
The chile is shipped into the stores in bushel burlap bags. You buy the bag first, and it will have a tag labeling it hot, medium hot, medium, or mild. These labels aren't entirely reliable. Generally speaking, buy down regarding hotness labeling. I always want to get a bag of mild chile, because a bushel of this is so much cheaper than buying green bell peppers, but usually they run out of mild fast, and even mild tends to have some heat.
Then you take your bushel bag of chile out to the chile roasting device, and the person who roasts the chile does the deed for you. After the chile is done, the chile roaster guy (I've never seen a woman in charge of this) will put it in a big plastic garbage bag, and then it sits in there and steams, which helps the skins separate. This always sort of vaguely bothers me because of plastic and heat, but it's only once a year and I guess it won't kill us some when we do this. You can, however, buy your chile raw and roast it yourself on your grill, and skip the plastic - you can use other containers to steam the hot roasted chile; metal, ceramic.
I always buy my chile at La Tienda Thriftway. That's one of our three grocery stores in town. The others are Wal-mart and Albertson's. At Albertson's, they put your chile bag in the original burlap bag the bushel came in. At La Tienda, they save the burlap bags in a pile and put your chile in a banana box. That works for me, because I can then strap the banana box across the rack and baskets on my bicycle. I can always use a burlap bag, but I can also always use a banana box.
Thriftway is a small chain down here in SE New Mexico. Our local one is called "La Tienda Thriftway," and they have a wonderful line of spices and good stuff in their produce section, that you would expect from a store close to the border named thusly.
Their chile roasters wear red t-shirts with logos about their being chile roasters. They are shy guys who don't speak a lot of English. Sometimes they look kind of long-suffering, like today when one of the chile customers kept badgering the guy doing the roasting, to give him some of the burlap bags the chile comes in. He spoke good English, he wanted ten. The chile roaster guy, who looked pained, said "I don't know?" and shrugged his shoulders in a discouraging manner.
The burlap bag hustler guy said; "OK, how about five?"
The chile roaster guy succumbed and said "OK."
I didn't like the bag hustler guy for that. I thought he should be nicer about how to obtain his burlap bags.
He should not, I thought, take chile for granted. It's not so easy to do it right, to grow it, to harvest it, to work with the rainfall, to time the seasons of harvest. You have to know what you are doing.
The bags are part of the whole chile thing. Maybe they throw the bags away at La Tienda, I don't know. Maybe they reuse them to store things in. I know I do, when I have a burlap bag handy. Just like I do when I have a banana box handy.
I do not, however, go about shaking people down for these things, just because they are staff people working with the harvest. I do not look at them like they are some kind of person I can intimidate, because they do not speak the language I do.
Sometimes when I've bought my chile from the La Tienda people, I've had fun kidding around with the roaster guy, in my pidgin Spanish and his pidgin English. I remember one guy who I ran into inside the store the next year, when he was working bagging groceries. "How did you like your chile!" he asked happily.
"It was great!" I replied. "You guys always do it so good!"