I got some red jalapenos from the grocery this past week, and tried to make chipolte out of them. Couple of things went wrong -- call it lessons learned.
I started out with my MES30 and pecan chips in the chip box. Set the temp control to 140. After an hour, I checked and was getting hardly any smoke. Upped the temp to 180F, but still got very little smoke. I could peek through the hole and see that the wood chips were hardly even scorched. This is consistent with my friend's experience with a newer model of MES30. I'd thought that since I have a full chip tray and not the dumbed down half sized version that I might get smoke at lower temps NOT SO.
So -- out came my new A-MAZE-N smoker. Filled it with hickory, lit two ends and let it go for another six hours. Turned off the heat after about an hour, but the box maintained temps of 110 or higher until the end.
Oh, and I should say that I started with split and seeded peppers -- except for one whole one.
What I ended up with were curled up red pepper halves, fairly brittle, but not looking at all like the pictures of the smoked jalapenos in this thread. I've been finishing the drying in the oven, a few hours at at time. We've tasted them, and they taste good -- but I'm not sure how close to chipoltes they are.
One other lesson learned -- I started out trying to put them on a round pizza pan wire mess grate. Turned out it was about 1/4 inch too big, and when I latched the door I sprung it. It had a small gap at the top where you could see in, and smoke came out. Today I managed to get it pushed back into good closure -- but that was scary for a while. Don't try this at home!