17 SEPTEMBER 26-OCTOBER 2, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | Hot Topic HOW THE MOSCO FAMILY CREATED COLORADO’S GREEN CHILE DYNASTY. BY CATIE C HESHIRE The side of the Vinny & Marie’s Italian Street Food truck is adorned with black-and-white images of James “Jimmy the Wolf” Pino’s family. Pino started operating the truck, which blends Italian-American classics with green chile peppers grown outside Pueblo, in 2021, after his grandmother encouraged him to chase his dream. Pino’s family history is fl avored by the chile that is named after his uncle, Harry Mosco, who fi rst recognized that the humble crop could become a hot item. As he grew chiles on the family farm, Mosco began selecting seeds that led to big- ger, tastier chiles. After his death, nephew Mike Bartolo took the project to Colorado State University, which made the Mosco chile designation offi cial. Now Colorado is known for green chile grown in Pueblo, with cooks serving up dish after dish packed with the spicy, robust fl avor from the pepper grown on the plains. And chances are, the pepper is a Mosco chile. Bartolo says that around 400 to 500 acres of Mosco chiles are grown in Colorado each year, representing a little less than half of the estimated 1,000 total acres of peppers planted in the state. “It’s kind of unfair, because it gets a lot more publicity than it deserves based on his contribution to the overall economy in the state,” Bartolo says of the Mosco name. “But nonetheless, it’s something that brings this emotion and this interest that a lot of people share, because there’s just so many types of dishes that it can be infused in.” Green chile stews are most common, but the peppers can also be roasted and diced and added to almost any dish where an extra kick is needed. Debates about which restau- rants have the best green chile abound, as does a rivalry with New Mexico’s Hatch green chile. But as Mosco’s descen- dants will tell you, all chiles are good chiles. The story of Colorado’s green chiles begins in 1910, when the Mirasol pepper made its way from Mexico to Pueblo. The ancestor of the Mosco, the Mirasol has the signature fl avor but is smaller and less hearty for roasting. Shortly after the Mirasol came to Colo- rado, so did Filomena Mosca, who joined her husband, Fiorino Mosca, in Pueblo, where he’d moved from Abruzzo, Italy, in 1899, when the family name became Mosco. “When they immigrated, that’s when the ‘o’ came,” says Pino. “That’s another story of Ellis Island.” The couple had fi ve children — Angelo, Louis, Joseph, Mary and Harry — who would all go on to cultivate the chiles that bear their family name. Harry Mosco served in World War II, driving tanks for the United States, including in Normandy. “He started farming when he came back,” Pino says. “He was really fond of peppers.” Harry Mosco grew many vegetable crops, but over time, he focused on cultivating the best peppers, selecting the plants that grew the biggest fruit and harvesting their seeds for the following year’s planting.“He would fi nd the peppers that grew toward the sun versus downward, like the Anaheims,” Pino says. “Mirasol” means “looking at the sun” in Spanish. Each fall, Harry and his wife, Helen, along with Har- ry’s brothers, would collect the most promising peppers and string them into ristras. Those strings would hang in an adobe shack until they dried, at which point the family would collect the seeds from the plants using window screens to sift them. “As that happened over time, he had a bag of seeds that he collected that were some of the best-yielding and thick- est and most fl avorful chiles,” Pino says. Harry died in 1988; for a few years, his bag of seeds stayed dormant. That’s when Mike Bartolo was working on his Ph.D. in plant physiology, after having earned a mas- ter’s degree in horticulture and a bachelor’s degree in bioagricultural sciences. When he fi nished his Ph.D. in 1990, Bar- tolo headed to the Colorado State University Arkansas Valley Research Center in Rocky Ford. The next year, his father and his wid- owed Aunt Helen gave Bartolo his Uncle Harry’s bag of seeds. With Helen’s permis- sion, Bartolo began planting the seeds over the seasons and identifying the best green chiles...just as Harry had done. “I was walking through one day and found a unique chile pepper,” Bartolo recalls. “I didn’t really intend to go in that direction with my research, but then I found that unique pepper.” Bartolo kept fi ne-tuning that unique chile in a single-plant selection process until it stabilized. “It took me several generations, fi ve or six generations, of doing that to get a single plant line so it was very uniform and very dependable, so when I planted it, I knew what was going to come out,” Bartolo says. Once he’d established that true line of peppers, he named them the Mosco, after his Uncle Harry. The Mosco has thicker walls than the Mirasol, so it’s ideal for turning in roasting tumblers and retaining its integrity. The Mosco has a Scoville rating of about 5,000 units, indicating that it has real heat. Also characteristic of the pepper are “fruity over- tones,” as Bartolo puts it, that help it stand out among other CAFE continued on page 18 FIND MORE FOOD & DRINK COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/RESTAURANTS Members of the extended Mosco family outside the Vinny & Marie’s food truck, which features its namesake green chiles. These green chiles are ready for a Vinny & Marie’s Mosco sandwich. EVAN SEMÓN EVAN SEMÓN
