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The Chili Powder Cheat

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Listen to the story on Gravy.

Texas: the land of BBQ, breakfast tacos… and of course Tex-Mex. But what if we told you Tex-Mex wasn’t created by a Texan or Mexican, but a German immigrant?

On this episode of Gravy, we tell you the story of William Gebhardt, the inventor of chili powder.

Gebhardt loved the chili con carne of the streetfood sold in the plazas of San Antonio. He adapted it back at his café, but quickly ran into a problem: chili peppers proved expensive and difficult to import. So he devised a solution. Gebhardt dried the peppers in an oven and used a hand-cranked coffee mill to grind them into a dust. He then mixed together the ground peppers with cumin seeds, oregano and some black pepper until he reached the right flavor. The end result? Gebhardt’s Eagle Chili Powder.

As it spread, chili powder came to define the taste of Tex-Mex. Chili, enchiladas, fajitas, nachos are all dishes built on the spice. And today, Tex-Mex dominates; traditional cuisines of the region are less popular.

Gebhardt’s history is a typical inventor tale. But he essentially took what poor Mexican-American streetfood vendors made, changed it and sold it for wider consumption. And boy, did Gebhardt market the heck out of it. Gebhardt’s slogan was “that real Mexican tang.”

College Behind Bars

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Listen to the story on APM Reports.

To get to the 99A college prep English class at California’s San Quentin State Prison, you pass through two security checks, two gates and a very thick, very old metal door that looks medieval. You walk into a courtyard surrounded by guard towers. Inmates in pale blue scrubs with the word “PRISONER” printed on the back in bright yellow are hanging around, playing baseball and chatting.

Across the yard sits a cluster of portable trailers. These are the education buildings, and they’re where the Prison University Project holds its classes.

One evening early this year about a dozen men sat at tables in one of the trailers, notebooks and pencils spread before them beneath the fluorescent lights. A guard supervised from a corner of the windowless room.

Once this was a not uncommon sight in an American prison, inmates doing hard time but working on a college degree that might help them get a job or otherwise adjust on the outside.

Every year 700,000 inmates leave prison, and there is ample evidence that those who have a college degree are less likely to come back. But, as the nation prepares an increase in the number of released prisoners, as reforms to sentencing guidelines for some drug offenses kick in, programs like San Quentin’s have become a rarity.

In this documentary I helped produce for APM Reports, lead producer Samara Freemark looks at college education in prisons across the United States.