Check out the recipes and news on the Art of Chipotle blog..

New from The Art of Chipotle!
Southwest Sunset Salsa
Pineapple Mojito Salsa
Mango Gingersnap Salsa
Black Bean Fiesta

Sweet Heat Addiction Chipotle Sauce
Crazzberry Fiesta Chipotle Sauce (Cranberry and raspberry -- tangy and sweet in balance.)
Fresh Cream Indulgence Chipotle Sauce
Smokey Red Sensation Chipotle Sauce

Gourmet Chipotle Paste

Check out the recipes on their website, including one for a secret-ingredient Bloody Mary!

And how about a dessert that gives you cold, sweet and heat at once? Top vanilla ice cream with equal amounts of chocolate sauce and Crazzberry Fiesta Sauce. Gently swirl them together so that each bite has a taste of all three.
 
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  Art of Chipotle

Tom Pfleider is a “chile head” who likes “bold taste with a pleasing heat.“ He explains, “With the first taste of the Art of Chipotle products, people become aware of the heat, and they think it’s going to ramp up and be painful. But the heat dissipates quickly and you’re left with a delicious taste that you can keep on eating forever.”

Tom is quick to point out that he comes from Minnesota, which isn’t exactly the chile capitol of the world, so he came to an appreciation of these flavors later is his life. His career as a manufacturers’ representative for a surgical supply company brought him to Southern California, where he met his wife Christina and eventually started two businesses. One provides surgical navigation systems to brain surgeons to make their task millimeter precise and recovery much quicker for the patient. The other is the Art of Chipotle.

Tom actually has a colleague in the medical field to thank for the Art of Chipotle. At a backyard barbecue hosted by a surgeon famous for treating Parkinson’s disease, “there was a sauce on the fajitas that was out of this world, different than anything I had ever tasted. Bob introduced me to the friend who had made the sauce from a family recipe, and I went into business with Sweet Heat Addiction Chipotle Sauce as our first product.

Chipotles are smoke-dried jalapeño peppers, and taking the sauce to market presented challenges, because of the difficulties of finding the best chilies, a reliable and consistent smoker, and then having them made into top-quality chipotle paste. Fortunately, all these “ingredients” came together for Tom with a fifth-generation pepper farmer who is an enthusiastic seed collector. The best seeds of each harvest have gone into the next season’s plantings. He also does the smoking, using a consistent process and always with Mesquite. The farmer’s long-time business associate makes the proprietary blend for Tom’s chipotle paste.

Tom is so pleased with the result, that he not only uses this special chipotle paste as the base for the Art of Chipotle sauces and salsas, he sells it in jars, so that home cooks and chefs can use it in their own recipes. “Everybody is cooking with chipotle now, but it’s a difficult ingredient to deal with. Cans are inconvenient, because inevitably there’s waste. It’s hard to control the heat level. Safety is a serious issue, because you can’t get the oil off your hands, and it can cause burns. So being able to spoon exactly the amount you need out of a jar is perfect.”

Tom has come a long way from the Minnesota guy who didn’t know much about food. “Twenty-five years ago I met Christina in a grocery store. She was reading something off the milk cartons, and I asked her what she was doing. She said she was finding the sell-by date. I had never heard of it! She offered to give me food shopping and food appreciation lessons – starting that evening with a barbecue with her friends. “I’m still hooked on her and hooked on Southern California,” he says, smiling broadly. Christina, daughter Taryn and son Evan, make up the Pfleider “Pepperhead” family that is the company’s logo.

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