Got to try a few more peppers from my garden - Ajvarski and Yellow Brazilian Starfish. Ajvarski tastes alright raw, but looking forward to having a few more ripen so that I can roast them up. Yellow Brazilian Starfish was a delight to snack on - a bit warm if you bite off near the centre, but very tropical (pineapple?) flavour in the “arms”.
Edit: I do want to say that the Starfish were much smaller than I realized they would be. I’d really love to produce a larger pepper, it was super tasty. Not sure how I’d go about that other than selectively saving seed…?
I saved seeds from Ashe County Pimento this year, which is a similar shape if you don’t find the Round of Hungary. They are open-pollinated, so always a chance of a cross. The two plants closest to it where Peperone di Senise and Elephant Ear, so at least the offspring is more likely to be sweet, although there are some firey hot ones within a dozen feet as well.
Hi im currently growing Ashe county pimento pepper on my balcony. I choose them because of taste and availability( i sourced them last year when i was in NC, but living in netherlands) and because its suitable for intentsive spacing. They develop great for the conditions they are in only now some of them flip some leaves upside down. Its this because of spacing?
They are close but from my experience peppers can handle pretty tight spaces. When I first started gardening I would cram 20 peppers in a 14 inch pot and you would be surprised how many live and fruited. I have heard the best size pot for a pepper is a 5 gallon pot but I hear they can grow and fruit in 1 gallon. The ones that died lost their leaves and kind of just became sticks.
They are together in a selfmade box that has 40 gallon of soil inside, they are with 5 ocupying half the space so they are together in 20 gallons. From what i have seen this Variety is not heavy bearing like 3 fruits per plant so i def want to wait till fruits fully set. Could it be something else that flips the leaves? Its very shaded and gets direct sun only late afternoon when its at its hottest. Yet i dont see any sunburns on the peppers or the other plants.
Every pepper is very different flavored. Ghost peppers have a unique fruit like flavor. Getting past the heat to taste it is the trick. Thai hot dragons have a distinguishable deep pepper flavor. Habanero are a unique delicious type. Jalapeno are common tasting green peppers but still very delicious. If you would like to try some different types $2.50 gets you a jar of pure wicked bear killer
I enjoy it very much reduced down with other salsa. Then you can taste and appreciate the complex flavors. Add 3 heaping spoonfulls to your regular salsa or more if desired and enjoy the complexed flavors.
I have eaten it by itself and love heat. It is a punishing experience i enjoyed immensely once. I have eaten authentic and spicy food from around the world. I promise you that spraying pepper spray in your mouth as breath freshener would be wiser than eating the above salsa straight with chips. You will not finish that jar with chips even if your from thailand. Food from Mexico is sometimes served with straight habanero salsa, but my sister and i finished the salsa from there, no problem.
Habanero are not that hot in the grand scheme of things. I think habanero are only 300k shu. Ghost pepper is 1 million shu. Carolina Reaper is 2.2 million. I forget the name of the pepper but there is one that seeds are for sale and are claimed to be hotter than the Carolina Reaper but are untested. There are other ones that are known to be hotter but seeds are not sold to the public. The one that has the seeds sold is known to not be as productive as a Carolina Reaper though. I would also argue that a little of a Carolina Reaper will overflow most people who love spice and those without a tolerance to spice will just puke it up. Plus once you get up to those super hot flavors they become really hard to grow. They take so much time. Many are starting them around Christmas to harvest by October. Even my Fatalii I got from plant did not produce on time for my area. You really almost need to grow things like Carolina Reaper inside where I live because it just takes too long.
This is technically true, but I think using the entire Scoville scale for perspective is missing one important aspect. Most people can only regularly eat a lot of peppers if those peppers are somewhere between 5-20K on the Scoville scale, or 50-100K for peppers used in small amounts just for heat and a whiff of flavor. Most peppers are just too hot to be all that useful in the kitchen, even for people who like spicy (a big reason being, even pepperheads often get heartburn and other unpleasant health effects from very spicy peppers).
A habanero might not be very high on the Scoville scale, but it’s already outside the zone of “this is a great pepper, I’m just going to eat it because I like how it tastes” and even getting past the “this is really hot, but if I clean away all the seeds and use a small amount, I can still somewhat taste it without it being too hot to eat on a regular basis” zone for a lot of people. A habanero with the spiciness of decently hot Jalapeno would be so much more useful in the kitchen. And a habanero around the banana pepper to poblano pepper range would be a habanero you could make stir fry and the best frickin’ fajitas ever with.
The creator of the Carolina Reaper, Ed Currie, has a hotter pepper called Pepper X. I’m not sure if that’s a placeholder name or not. And according to Ed Currie, unlike the Carolina Reaper, he doesn’t like the flavor of the new one.
Well, the videos I’ve seen of Ed Currie himself eating them, he can barely eat one, and even then, he’s seeing stars and has numbness in his fingers and stuff from the pain. He uses hot peppers as a substitute for hard drugs apparently, since it gets him into a lot less trouble. After he got clean he started breeding hotter peppers chasing that high.
Very much not the sort of pepper most people should consider growing. Focus on flavour (ah, such posh, much Brit) is the name of the game. For extreme spice, it’s easier to just buy capsaicin extract and huff that stuff after cutting it to their desired level of pain and suffering.
From what I have heard a lot of pepper heads are ex drug users. The way to make a killer fajita is to use bell peppers for the regular peppers and use my guac recipe for the heat. I use 2 habanero, 1 beefsteak tomato, 3 avocado, I dump in cilantro and garlic salt with a lime. I grind everything but the avocado together in a mocajete but I suppose a stone mortar and pestle work work too. Once everything is grinder into a past I add the avocados and grind them in. I find 2 habanero because I find one is not enough heat for me. Problem with the SHU rating system is it does not take into account heat tolerance. If I stop eating spicy food for a few weeks a habenero will burn me but if I keep eating habenero my eat tolerance builds very high. Also some people can handle more heat than others. My grandma cannot handle heat, my mother can handle a bit and I love heat. If you wanted to try the pepper X you are SOL. He has only released the pepper X in hot sauce form and it is known to be watered down to the point it has far less heat. That seems to be the tradition now days. Instead of releasing the pepper where anyone can propagate and steal it they put it into products that they can control. A pepper junkie will tell you that one pod can be hotter than the next. Jim Duffy is well known in the pepper communities and he has said on video lots of times that one pepper can be hotter than the hottest pepper one day and the next it may be something else. He sells hundreds of pepper seed types so he knows what he is doing. He just has a personality let’s say and I don’t like or get along with that personality. In regards to peppers like the habenero not being able to be eaten every day plenty can. I will eat quacamole with 2 habenero multiple times a week. To me habenero are the bare minimum for heat.
I used to eat habaneros… mainly for the shock value… but would be having intestinal cramps within 30 minutes or so. So I stopped. Jalapenos & Cayennes are plenty hot.
I’ve grown Habanada for several years, and really like the flavor.
Roulette hybrid (another no-heat habanero) was really good and productive last year; I’m growing it again.
Grew Trinidad Perfume (a low/no heat Scotch Bonnett) for two years, but just didn’t like the flavor. Same for Aji Dulce… there’s some aromatic that it has I don’t care for.
Nadapeno (I still grow some jalapenos, too) has been very good, and very productive. I’m trying two others this year, ‘Coolapeno’, and ‘Fooled You!’.
I would call Aji Dulce a sweet pepper I think those are the peppers they sell at Costco. My mother loves them. Like I mentioned above people seem to have a built in set up heat tolerance and then go up from there. Of course if you stop eating spicy foods your tolerance drops back down to previous levels.
