Hot peppers only. Which varieties do you grow?

[mamuang]

We have a few pepper threads here. When I tried to look for info about hot peppers, It was difficult because those pepper threads have both hot and sweet peppers intermingled.

I’d like to create a thread just for hot peppers. It would be conveinient for those of us who like it hot to look for info. I hope you can join me and contribute to this thread.

I love spicy food. In an ethnic restaurant like Thai, Chinese, Korean, etc., there is a four star system assigned to each spicy dish. With that reference, my spiciness tolerant is a 4. Comparing to my many Thai friends, I’d be a 3 at best.

This year, we grow this hot pepper. We believe it is a Chocolate Habanero. Boy, it is hot. The tiny piece we ate was so hot my ears almost popped!!!

What do you grow? How would you like to use it?

[Botanical_Bryce]

I am growing the Thunder Mountain Chili peppers. These are some of my shorter ones believe it or not. I just grabbed these two this morning. I got them for fun but ended up really liking the flavor.

[mamuang]

Very cool. How hot?

I grow a few hot ones. thanks to @thepodpiper’s generosity.

[Botanical_Bryce]

Hard for me to tell because some people tell me they are hot. For me medium hot with an excellent flavor.

[subdood_ky_z6b]

I like hot peppers and have grown some different varieties over the last few years. We always grow jalapeno, which I consider pretty warm, but not overly so. We’ve grown Serrano in the past, I consider them a bit hotter than jalapenos. We grew Habanero this and last year, they were almost mild last year, but pretty hot this year. But, they have a flavor I don’t really care for. Our three plants (from a local nursery) this year are getting huge, and have set quite a few pods, so we’ll have a bumper crop of them. I tried to germinate some Chocolate Habs, but they never sprouted for me.

The hottest I’ve grown is Bulgarian Carrot, that’s one pepper I can’t eat a whole one, even though they’re no more than 3-4". Pretty intense heat.

We found some hot sauce at a local thrift store that has some Scorpion pepper in it, and I like to put a few drops on certain dishes to give them a bit of zing, but have to be very careful with it!

This year the hottest we’re growing are White and Bubblegum 7-pots. Supposedly they have heat at around 1 million Scoville units, or about 100 times hotter than a jalapeño. They’re finally setting some pods, just hope we can get some to sample before the freeze gets them. I’m growing them mostly out of curiosity. My sis in law likes really hot varieties, and I’m going to offer her some of these on a dare. These, and the BG (plus many other peppers we’ve tried) were seeds from @thepodpiper. Many thanks to him for his generosity.

[mamuang]

I hope to grow extremely hot peppers so I could grind them to be used against squirrels. @Drew51, has grown quite a few very hot ones but I can’t remember which was the hottest he grew last year.

[erect-and-thornless]

i grow three hot peppers: serranos, vietnamese tear jerkers (i initially thought they were thai, due to similar appearance), and datils.

the serranos and VTJs are awesome; i can eat them all year long, and it’s a shame the plants can’t keep up with me. but here i want to provide a mini-review of the datil pepper flavor, for those who aren’t familiar with it.

i bought datil seeds based on the fruit description: about as hot as an habanero (scoville 100k-300k), but with a fruity/smoky flavor. i harvested my first one a couple days ago, and it had been orange-colored (a sign of ripeness) for a couple days before harvest, and here are my first impressions:

it is hot! i sliced up a few slivers, and each one provided a huge, heat-filled punch. i did taste a little bit of fruitiness, but i’m not sure i tasted smokiness. one thing that bothered me about the flavor is that there’s a weird but peculiarly potent milky flavor + aftertaste; perhaps that flavor will lessen after further ripening or with the right food combination, but if that aspect of the flavor remains prominent, then i will have spent a lot of time and energy growing a pepper i don’t like.

it’s hard to describe that milky flavor + aftertaste; it’s not salty, sweet, sour, or bitter. but it’s not to my liking—it’s not the pleasant milkiness of yogurt, ice cream, cheese.

as i gain more experience with the datil, i’ll report back here on further impressions.

someone else’s datil pic:

[erect-and-thornless]

oh, and i found my vietnamese peppers being ravaged recently. whole, green branches being gnawed off. i initially thought birds were accessing my plants for nesting materials as if they were an avian home depot, but the multiple BB-sized black droppings seemed inconsistent with bird feces. also, birds had never bothered my pepper plants before.

one pepper plant had 16 visible sheared-off branches. on another plant, i counted 21 naked branch points. who knows how many sub-branches were lost.

and last night, i saw this four-inch beast hanging upside down from a twig. [someone else’s pic, but same appearance.] it was eating a pepper at the moment i disrupted its operations. as magnificent-looking as this creature is, i had to dispatch it. i later read that just a handful of these tomato hornworms can devastate a patch of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants in short order. they’re hard to find because of their coloration, and they tend to go on feeding sprees at night.

the caudal horn is not poisonous.

[NuttingBumpus]

Last year I bought an Anaheim pepper from Lowe’s, re-potted it and kept it over the winter. It set just three lovely seedless pods which came ripe in a west-facing window in January. Great taste and adequate heat when deep red.

This year I sowed seed for Fish and Leutschauer peppers. There are now two each of them in four inch pots. Leutschauer is the more vigorous of the two. I am converting the back porch to something of a greenhouse in order to keep them going year-round.
My hope (thanks to some of you who have done this and written about it) is to grow all three for 5 years or more and see how they will do so far north as Spokane, WA.
When they bloom I’ll tickle 'em with a feather and should get decent cross-pollination. Will keep you posted.

[Mountain_Donkey]

i grew alost 25 different peppers this year and around 15 the year before last

i have alot of good recommendations, i will post later with pics

[Mountain_Donkey]

Jonah- perfumed chinense, really productive, red flavor, pepperlover.com

Lumbre- awesome green chile, productive, chileseedusa.com

Tabasco-nice addition for soups green or red stage productive tabasco.com gift shop

MOA jamaican scoch bonnet - medium productivity, excellent perfumed chinense flavor pepperlover.com

shattah- productive excellent eaten in green stage pepperlover.com

yellow jalapeno- excellent pepper for nachos and cheese applications, productive chileseedusa.com

rosemary pepper- slight habanero flavor on an annuum enjoyable productive pepperlover.com

carolina cayenne- excellent chile for crushing and drying, productive tradewindsfruit.com

peruvian white habanero- productive white habanero excellent flavor ebay

lady choi- red pepper traditionally used for kim chi worth noting due to its slightly sour flavor kitazawaseed.com

guajillo- red enchilada new mex pepper, excellent roasted, great with cheese chileseedusa.com

I have tons of seeds of yellow jalapenos and lumbres still from seed companies they send you an ounce of them which equals a ton of seeds
message me if want

I still have alot of peppers ripening in the garden i will edit this post if i find more worth noting.

i noticed they grew alot better when started early in march and given a mix of leaf mulch and clay soil with plant tone and diatomaceous earth

also given shade in morning and sun most of the afternoon feel free to ask questions i am full of answers

MOA scotch bonnet one of my favorites from this year for its perfumed flavor without bitterness

[georgep]

I favor low-modest heat peppers. Cayenne and Jalapeno are about as hot as I can enjoy. I’ve been growing Beaver Dam peppers for about 10 years. I bought the original seeds from Fedco of Maine and have been saving the seeds each year since. Fedco advertised Beaver Dam as the lowest heat hot pepper they sell. The heat level was all over the place during the first few years I grew them with some peppers too hot for me to eat and some just wonderful. They really do have a marvelous flavor so I kept growing them. After a few years, I understood that the flesh is not hot at all and uniquely tasty. There is a lot of heat concentrated in the fleshy ribs of the pepper wall. I adjust the heat level by the amount of ribs I include with the flesh. For instance, when I cook up a pepper-and-egg omelet, I’ll only include about 10%to 15% of the ribs. The seeds are just plain too hot for me to tolerate. Its the best tasting pepper I’ve grown. I’ll see if I can add a photo in the next couple of days.

[Khaled314]

After growing multiple different varieties, most of them habanero like or related, I realized that I really don’t enjoy the habanero aftertaste. I detect a subtle sweetness that accompanies the heat, sometimes before and sometimes afterwards, that I really don’t like.

I go back and forth between chili pequin and chiltepin. Both have intense heat. One hits you right away, and the other hits you a couple of bites later (for those of you like me who like to have a bite off of the chili with each mouthful of food).

For consistent heat and flavor, I like the Thai chilis and black cobra peppers . There have been some interesting peppers mentioned in this thread that I will have to check out. I was discouraged a few years ago when I spoke with a pepper guru about my thoughts on habanero flavors and he didn’t seem to have any alternatives for me to look into. Glad I came across this post.

-Khaled

[Drew51]

@mamuang

I can’t remember which was the hottest he grew last year.

I have grown quite a few different ones, including the world’s hottest, which changes from time to time as newer super hots are developed. Carolina Reaper. was the hottest at one point.
I found it hard to make a good spray though. I think skinning them would help as the skin was a problem. If you roast them you can skin them, but roasting super hots is probably not a good idea unless you have a mask on!

@georgep

Its the best tasting pepper I’ve grown.

I like Beaver Dam too, they are very tasty. I love them for stuffing. I really like the cooked flavor.

@Khaled314

he didn’t seem to have any alternatives for me to look into.

I do, closely related to habanero, but a better flavor for me are the scotch bonnets. They do vary a lot on heat depending on strain. Some have little heat, most are fairly hot. They don’t have that flavor you describe, I don’t like it either.

As I get older the heat is becoming less desirable as my stomach has become sensitive to certain foods. My wife too, just likes a little heat. I found Big Jim green chile to be ideal for Tex-Mex dishes with mild heat. I also needed the mildest jalapeño I can find and Mammoth jalapeño fit the bill, with full flavor and mild heat. Also Banana peppers. the latter two being fantastic pickled.

[smsmith]

We grow habaneros and jalapenos most every year and sometimes serranos. Most years we struggle to ripen the habaneros due to lack of heat. This year we haven’t had any problems, I picked the first orange fruit a couple days ago. We’re going to have gallons of both habaneros and jalapenos to freeze. We both enjoy the fruity flavor of habanero peppers.

[Fusion_power]

Chapeau de Frade is a superb seasoning pepper for soup or chili. It is Capsicum Baccatum.

[mamuang]

A lot of information shared here. Thank you everyone. I’ve planted several varieties last year but got their pots and names mixed up so I could not tell what was what.

We grow a few more this year but we started out very late. Except for the Chocolate Habanero, nothing ripens yet. Once these peppers ripen, I hope to post pics and our tating experience.

[SliceOfHeaven]

Thai, Ghost, Habanero, Serrano, Jelapeno

[tonyOmahaz5]

Here are some of my hot peppers.

Tony

[erect-and-thornless]

very noss, omaha. what variety?