Chiltepín Dark Chocolate

The chiltepín is the only chili pepper native to the United States, growing wild across the borderlands of the Sonoran Desert and the Sierra Madre Occidental — small, round, and fierce, with a heat that arrives fast and fades cleanly, leaving the pepper's bright fruit notes behind. Honored in the Slow Food Ark of Taste for its cultural and ecological significance, it has fed and flavored this region for thousands of years. We source ours from areas protected by the Northern Jaguar Project, an organization working to preserve North America's northernmost jaguar habitat in the Sierra Madre, where chiltepín grows as it always has — wild and unharvested until it isn't.