The reason I took away from this: large agricultural producers of peppers bred towards a "low heat, low variance" standard, away from a "high variance" standard that produced frequent hot jalapenos. Low-heat-low-variance is better for mass food production, because producers can just dose the capsaicin directly, which is something they can't do easily when every pepper is a wildcard.
There are second-order effects, like drip irrigation and cultivation techniques that optimize for shape, size, and color over heat --- but those are enabled by the industrial jalapeno's new position in the production chain. The peppers just aren't the point where the heat is introduced anymore; that happens later. Might as well optimize for good looking peppers.
This seems fine? Peppers are one of the easier and more forgiving things to grow yourself. Just grow your own or buy from a farmer's market.
Moments later, after reading the thread
This kind of stuff really seems to piss people off, but when you think about the disempowerment of the jalapeno, try to keep in mind that the same industrial processes have performed unalloyed positive things. Have you noticed that you're way more into brussels sprouts now than you were when you were a kid? If you're a GenX-er or a Millenial, that's because today's (delicious) sprouts aren't the same plant as the (gross) sprouts of yore. Same deal with broccolini, which hadn't even been invented until after your birthday (for most of you).
> Have you noticed that you're way more into brussels sprouts now than you were when you were a kid? If you're a GenX-er or a Millenial, that's because today's (delicious) sprouts aren't the same plant as the (gross) sprouts of yore.
This is an oft-quoted fact, and it’s true that modern brussels sprouts are less bitter, but that’s far from the whole story. The popular preparation used to be boiling or steaming, and many people still find that gross with modern varieties. But over the past 15-20 years, frying or roasting them, and topping it off with things like bacon, parm, balsamic reduction, etc. became the standard preparation, and this is just a way more delicious way to cook them (for most ppl). I’d assume this makes a massively bigger difference than a reduction in bitterness.
I don't mind steamed sprouts today, but I remember how utterly repulsed I was by them as a kid. The preparation doesn't make a ton of difference, in my opinion.
My wife and I got some brussels sprouts recently that tasted exactly how I remember them as a kid. We both noticed it immediately and my daughter refused to eat them (when she normally loves them).
So while that may be true, it’s absolutely true that they’ve changed.
I'm not so sure. I feel like the quality of fast food ingredients has gone up since the 90s.
I have a couple of theories: I think consumer preferences have pushed in that direction (e.g. I remember McDonalds chicken nuggets used to have chewy gristle in them), and JIT inventories mean that ingredients can be fresher, and food science (e.g. additives and preservatives) has improved, and improved flavor along with it, and there are also new preparation methods which improve quality of the final product.
Chickens have gained significant breast mass in the last few decades (so much so it causes "woody breast") and, with increased supply, the price of breast meat (less gristle) has come down proportionally. Like the McRib, economics drives McDonald's decisions.
> I feel like the quality of fast food ingredients has gone up since the 90s.
Interesting. My impression has been the exact opposite of that. Ingredients seem more uniform, true, but they also are much less flavorful and seem to be higher in salt than ever.
When I was a kid, brussels sprouts were prepared by boiling them in water for an hour, and serve with absolutely no seasonings.
I can go down the street to a restaurant called Left Bank and they have the most amazing brussels sprouts. I think they cook them in bacon grease. The outside is crispy and it has something like caramelized sugar on it. They are absolutely freaking delicious.
Overcooking will increase the bitterness, the preparation makes a ton of difference.
I don't really recall how my mom might have cooked broccoli and such, but I certainly identified things she did cooking that were not ideal as far as outcomes (and I would say she was a reasonably good cook).
Completely agree about the prep. It's not a modern phenomenon either. Even 1960s mainstream influencers like Julia Child were showing people how to peel and incise the stems, pan fry with butter, salt and olive oil oven roast, serve with various sauces, etc.
What changed is the marketing around home cooking. Now everyone aspires to be their own private chef. It's understandable for people living in the mid-20th century western world to see all this as a bit pretentious.
The goal back then was just to get a decent healthy meal on the table. Any flourishes such as adding bacon, duck fat, or whatever else were likely seen as unhealthy, inaccessible, or just plain weird.
Similarly to overcooking, acids may break down bitters. There's useful science in why things like balsamic reductions and citrus fruit juices are commonly used in brussel sprout recipes today.
The spread of such information/science in recipes has increased from the slower era of cookbooks and newspaper columns.
cut them in quarters, sprinkle dash of salt, stir fried 'til brown over medium-high heat with olive oil, and sprinkle few drops of fish sauce (or oyster sauce depending on pref).
prep it makes a huge difference and it's one of best tasting/healthy vegetable imo.
I cook because going to a restaurant is prohibitively expensive to do every day. Raw ingredients in Norway are already expensive. Most folks cook because they have few decent choices and like the past, they take shortcuts when they can.
At one time, yes, women did most cooking, to a point and dependent on where one lived. Kitchens were dangerous for not only you, but your neighbor too - if you lived in a city. Which meant that if you lived in a city, you bought bread because you were very unlikely to have a place to bake it. You might not have a kitchen at all - most folks living in Roman cities just didn't and purchased food elsewhere.
You might not even know how to make bread, being a woman in the past. Professional cooks and bakers were often men.
If the OP was eating horribly tasting brussel sprouts as a child, it is fair to say that one of the parents were doing the cooking and that they probably were lousy cooks. I don't think anybody would go out to purchase boiled brussel sprouts in the streets to feed their kids. But I might be wrong.
> At one time, yes, women did most cooking
In all of history until very recently. Still in most of the world. Especially in rural areas.
> I cook because going to a restaurant is prohibitively expensive to do every day.
Norway is notorious for this, yes. But still, just because you make food at home doesn't mean that you cook. (Not meaning you personally) People can make sandwiches, as you might know. I had several Norwegian friends who were sustaining themselves on sandwiches exclusively. An impressive feat, considering that bread in Norwegian supermarkets is probably the lowest quality bread in the world.
There's also a generation of old men who are lost between the old and the new world. Many of them being without a woman to cook and too stubborn to learn any cooking of their own, while at the same time not accepting to pay for their food in a restaurant or eatery, because that's "too fancy" and "too expensive", they instead sustain on canned fish and sandwiches made with the worst industrial processed ingredients they can find in a supermarket.
Yeah, but these people usually don't hate cooking. While if you had to cook because you were a woman, quite a few probably hated it and thus never improved.
Not the case in Europe at all. Any $RANDOM woman here over 40/50 cooks far better than any one in the US. My mother has a huge amount of recipes inside her head.
Also, homemade food in Europe (especially the Southern) has a much better quality than any industry-processed food.
I don't know how your statement disagrees with mine? You are basically agreeing with me. A "random woman" in Europe who cooks well is not random at all, because we live in different times and people cook because they like it or are good at it. There are very few people who are bad cooks anymore, because those who are bad at cooking simply do not cook at all, especially not for other people.
In the past you'd have a lot of bad cooks, because most women had to cook, wether they were good at it or liked it or not.
I'm prepared to believe that in Southern Europe, family cooking traditions have been kept alive and healthy, resulting in high quality cooking. In Northern Europe and the US I don't know what the hell was going on in the 20th century.
Sure, but the percentage of people with that gene hasn't changed, yet it is an oft-cited anecdote (I don't know if there's data) that more people like them now than they did forty years ago.
This is often said to be because of the new breed that is less better, but I also agree with GP that better cooking methods have something to do with it. I love brussels sprouts, but my stomach flips at the thought of boiled sprouts.
People’s taste also change (sometimes dramatically) as they age, aside from any differences in farming or prep, though I don’t doubt what you’re saying.
The preparation concept is huge. Growing up way back in the day, industrial canned spinach was absolutely disgusting and pushed on all forms of school cafeterias. They even tried to influence its liking with a cartoon character. Many many years later, fresh spinach was made available and I find it delicious. How anyone thought that mushy slop from a can was ever considered edible is beyond me.
> The popular preparation used to be boiling or steaming, and many people still find that gross with modern varieties.
What is wrong with people? They're delicious, and an absolute must along side a reindeer roast with a creamed mushroom sauce, or similar. Steamed of course.
Though I did learn the hard way as a kid that they can be rather harsh on the stomach when raw...
What's "wrong with people" is they don't like eating poison. You can train yourself to like anything, but the bitter alkaloids that give brussel sprouts and such their nasty bitter taste are indeed a toxin. There isn't enough to be dangerous in modern varieties, but there was in their wild ancestors.
Bitterness is quite literally the "this is poison, stop eating" taste category that incidentally happens to have a lot of false positives because for the most part it's cheaper to reject some good food than to accept eating some poison. An ironic thing to say in a thread about peppers, but still.
And much much more false negatives, which raises the question if the "stop eating this, this is bitter and bitter means poisonous" has any truth in it.
If bitter = poisonous, then the plants that evolve to be more bitter will be eaten less. Thus, non-poisonous foods that evolve to be more bitter have a genetic advantage over their less bitter counterparts.
That would be true if there were a fitness advantage for the plant when a herbivore dies, but in actually the fitness advantage comes from discouraging the herbivore from eating the plant.
They are much less bitter if the plants had been exposed to frost before harvesting. My parents used to have them in the garden. Brussels sprouts in winter were nice.
I can agree with the first part. Here in Seattle, commonly known as South Alaska, I always order the
McReindeer burger at McDonald’s when it’s in season (they alternate with the NcRib).
I should have specified it's wild mushrooms, we have a lot of funnel chanterelle[1] (do not confuse it with deadly webcap[2] which can grow alongside) and regular chanterelle by our cabin, so usually that's what we use.
I don't know that I buy this; I eat sprouts raw (slivered with a food processor) about as often as I roast them. They're noticeably sweet as a salad base.
Chiles are actually fruits and, combined judiciously, create a lot of complex flavors. Excess spiciness overwhelms the flavor. And people who want absurdly spicy peppers, can get them: ghost chiles, carolina reapers, and so on.
> I prefer more flavorful chiles, with less spice.
As someone with a fairly high spice tolerance, I've found a strong correlation between heat and flavor. I think anyone coming from a culture that eats spicy food will agree.
I had a batch of habaneros I grew last summer that were both the most spicy habaneros I've had, and by far the most flavorful. I've also had some very tasty ghost peppers (when used in moderation). Outside of peppers that are inherently not spicy, such as pablanos, heat and flavor seem to coincide.
All of the most flavorful chili dishes I've had in my life have all been quite spicy, and I can't recall any mild chili dishes I've had with nearly the same punch.
The only time I've seen heat and flavor not connected is in terrible hot sauces which aim to be shockingly spices that make use of capsaicin extract.
As someone who also prefers the taste that comes along with spice, best reasoning I have heard is folks who don’t like spice cannot even taste the flavor that comes with it, so they associate milder peppers as tasting better. I.e. when you are screaming for water you don’t stop to consider the flavor (or you may not even taste it at all as your brain tells you to go into flight mode).
Yes, I think you're right. When I eat something that's too spicy for me, I can't taste anything. My tongue is numb and feels like it's burning. It doesn't even have to get to the level of screaming for water; I can power through eating it even if it's spicy enough to where my tongue feels numb, but it's not pleasant, and I don't taste anything. I wouldn't even say that I "don't like spice," as spicy food can taste good, but if it gets too spicy I can't taste anything.
Yep, I literally can't taste food if it's past a certain level of spiciness. I have had hot sauces that friends insisted were incredibly distinctive but I could not even tell apart.
> As someone with a fairly high spice tolerance, I've found a strong correlation between heat and flavor. I think anyone coming from a culture that eats spicy food will agree.
I couldn't agree more. I grow a variety of chili plants on my balcony each year, from the Jalapeno (red and green) all the way to the Morugas and the Bhut Jolokias, with some varieties in between such as Chiltepins and Scotch Bonnet peppers. I think the Habanero is my go-to for most dishes - they're hot enough without being as insanely hot as the ones at the upper end of the scoville scale. That being said, I've enough experience now to know how much of which to put in each dish, and my freezer is full off pods from previous harvests.
I can't cook without chilis, garlic and onions. Nor can I sleep when either of those ingredients are missing. I get cold sweats just imagining that the next pandemic or apocalypse might be around the corner and I'm ill-prepared in terms of the three essential ingredients for surviving comfortably.
It certainly trends that way, but I'm not sure it's a sure correlation. Hatch chiles are flavorful, but not really spicy. Scotch Bonnets are probably among the most flavorful, while I find the much hotter Ghost pepper not to taste like much.
Yeah I think this logic only holds true for individual peppers within one species (or batches of peppers, or even regional variants of peppers). The hotter ones also have more flavor.
If you're comparing two different species of plant though I think all bets are off. If a correlation exists here it's very loose.
I don't think the correlation exists so much as it's been created by co-selection in many varieties. Consider many of the smaller, more ornamental, chile varieties: they're often quite spicy, but lack good flavor because they have an almost grassy solvent note in the background of their flavor profile.
That said, I get the hiccups (involuntary) when spice level exceeds a certain threshold, so I'd love if the flavor could be improved while keeping the spice level below my hiccup threshold.
In my opinion, habaneros have the best flavor out of any chili. Once you get hotter than that, they don't really get more flavorful. I've tasted Carolina Reapers a few times, and they just had this grassy vibe that wasn't very appealing. The very hot ones don't seem bred for flavor, just record-breaking heat.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I enjoy plenty of non-spicy foods, and don't need every meal to be spicy, nor to I think that the only flavorful meals are spicy meals.
My point is exclusively with chili peppers, as the spice increases so does the flavor. I didn't grow up eating spicy food, and my experience has been that as my spice tolerance has grown overtime I have found access to increasingly wonderful flavors that are simply not present at lower spice levels.
That's interesting, I am curious if it's the capsaicin itself you're tasting directly.
I know I've had hot sauces that were just heat without any kind of real flavor. It's not that I couldn't taste it. I could, I just didn't want any more of it.
It could be quite possible that for a given pepper, the variables that increase the capsaicin also increase the flavor compounds. It is possible to separate out the flavor, I remember reading about Grant Achatz experimenting with it, but you need a rotary evaporator to pull it off.
That isn't how it works, flavor sensitivity is orthogonal to heat sensitivity.
Being desensitized to heat does not desensitize you to flavor. Because of a correlation between heat and flavor diversity in peppers, people desensitized to the heat can taste the more complex range of flavors available in peppers.
There it is! It only took about a dozen posts to attract a fan of the recent trendiness in ultra hot peppers to state that heat lovers have superior taste.
I never stated any such thing nor am I a fan of ultra-hot peppers, but you sure seem insecure about it. What I did state is not controversial. Self-selecting expertise in the qualities of food applies to a great many things we eat. It doesn't have anything to do with "superior taste".
Anyone can learn to eat peppers, most people choose not to. Could swap out peppers for a very long list of other foods and it would still make sense.
I occasionally go through OCD cooking phases and I went through one after reading the cook book "Sauces" (https://www.amazon.com/Sauces-Classical-Contemporary-Sauce-M...). There's a throwaway sentence in the book that refers to chiles, and the sauces made with them ("salsa" means sauce) not being fully appreciated. This led me down the path of "fruit purees as salsa" and I spent a fair amount of time working with chiles and regular peppers.
I definitely agree, I find that once the spiciness exceeds some level I simply don't enjoy the flavor the food. But when the spiciness is below that threshold, I absolutely love the flavor of pureed peppers. You can definitely tell all the different chiles apart, some are quite earthy, others are sweet fruits (habanero), other taste like raisins to me (pasilla).
I really wish we could have a habanero that is 1/4 as spicy. I LOVE the flavor of habaneros but their spiciness prevents me from putting too much.
That said on the flavor/spiciness scale a lot of the Chinese varieties are excellent. The chili peppers used in Sichuanese cuisine are actually not that spicy compared to habaneros or Thai chilis, which allows it to be possible to dump a bag full into a dish and it gives it a LOT of rich flavor.
When using hot peppers I remove some of, or all, of the seeds and pith. You can greatly control the amount of heat this way since the seeds and pith have the most concentrated capsaicin.
Maybe habanero is too potent for that strategy but it works well on jalapeno, serrano, and whatever they grow in Hatch, NM.
(and it should be obvious but wear disposable gloves if you do this, unless you want the worst wank of your life).
Actual conversation I had last week with my daughter:
"Dad, did you cook something spicy in the skillet" (I have a cast iron skillet and normally am the only person who uses it)
"Yes, I made a sauce from chilis that was much too spicy, and used the skillet to cook the sauce down".
"Well, can you let me know next time, because I just made very spicy bacon!"
I normally only wipe down my cast iron skillet rather than cleaning it, and I think the metal is porous (even after seasoned), because I could still get a hint of spice on my finger from touching the cast iron surface.
Maybe put a half a cup to a cup of evoo and warm up the oil, swirling it around next time? Then you can let it cool down and maybe use this to solidify the oil?
What you want is a high iodine value. Both avocado and olive oil have low iodine values, and they’re premium oils, so doubly wasteful for cast iron seasoning.
I think the idea is the higher the smoke point the easier it is to bring the oil to a high temperature to get it to polymerize. I don't know if this is true, as my pan came preseasoned and then I mainly add to that by carbonizing previous bits.
I don't think the surface is porous so much as you didn't clean the pan and left capsaicin behind in it. You could try this with other materials - can you eliminate all the spice from stainless or glass without using soap as a surfactant?
It's fine to wash cast iron with soap, and when you're working with spicy things and others use the pan, you really ought to consider it. Even if you don't usually wash your pan.
I was in Jamaica a couple of months ago and they use habanero peppers a lot and I was astonished by how much I loved the flavour. I never buy them because I always assumed they were too spicy but you don’t need much for great flavour. I also hear what you’re saying and I’d be tempted to agree, but I wonder if the flavour would be negatively affected by the reduction in heat.
There is a variety of habanero developed in Oregon that look just like a regular one but have almost no heat. Unfortunately they don’t have the same fruity flavor or tartness as typical habaneros, or really much flavor at all.
One of the best unique beers I've ever had was a Jalapeno ale. The yeast had metabolized all the capsaicin, so there was zero spice. The Jalapeno flavor was crisp and clean, and you could taste a depth of flavor that was normally overshadowed by the heat. It made me appreciate peppers more now that I knew what to taste for. I've been meaning to try and recreate it and then work my way through various peppers/chilies.
Wait, does yeast break down capsaicin? That doesn’t make sense to me since I make a lot of extremely spicy fermented, hot sauces, and they don’t lose their heat.
I don't buy it either. I've had tons of chile beers and they are typically spicy. I once made a habanero stout and that thing was undrinkably spicy for years.
Could be, it is open air for atleast an hour or two so it could be either, especially since I faintly smell alcohol sometimes. Does adding salt always mean lacto bacillus?
There was a habanero watermelon beer out of NZ that was pretty good. Real crisp, cool, watermelon flavor up front, pretty fruity in the middle... then the heat hits. You want to cool it down then you take another sip and it repeats.
The way commercially packaged jalapenos are now is closer to no-heat than low heat. You could swap them with chopped bell peppers and most people probably wouldn't notice the difference (and many like my father would still complain that the dish is too spicy.)
Particularly the chopped and canned/jarred jalapenos; I used to buy them for pizzas and chilis but they're just not worth it anymore.
> Less spicy is actually good. I prefer more flavorful chiles, with less spice.
Then buy a poblano instead of a jalapeño and leave the jalapeños alone?
The problem isn't just that they have less heat. Anything which becomes "industrial" loses all of the characteristics that "industrial" doesn't select for.
This includes spice, flavor, juiciness, nutrition, scent, etc.
this is the way. ideally building up your spice ferocity with real peppers. dont get me wrong i did my time w ridiculous extract sauces (even before hot ones craze, smile) but its just not the same
> Less spicy is actually good. I prefer more flavorful chiles, with less spice.
Two problems with this idea as applies to the article. First, it's hard to separate the two in breeding (many of the most flavorful chiles, far more so than jalepenos, are pretty hot).
Second, industrial production optimizing for a lot of things: shipability, stability, shelf life, consistent size/appearance, in this case consistent capsicum ... most of these are considered more important than flavor according to revealed preference. Consider the current "standard tomato”. Round, dense, deep red, mostly flavorless.
So unfortunately you're likely to end up with a jalapeno that is more consistent, less hot, but also less flavorful - but looks good in the grocery.
The gist of that article is using the correct chiles for whatever your purpose is, ie mulatos over anchos for mole vs simply making everything weaker and accepting less heat overall.
Because the plants are reproduced asexually by cloning, exactly what you would expect happened, and a disease wiped out the monoculture fields (Gros Michel variety) of the early 1900s in the 50s and 60s.
Which we then replanted in purportedly less flavorful Cavendish, which was resistant to the then-dominant fungus.
Cue the new Panama fungal disease (Tropical Race 4) that Cavendishes are susceptible to, and we'll see what the future holds...
Maybe in 2085, grandparents will be waxing poetic about how they used to be able to get bananas everywhere cheaply.
It's fascinating to think that such a staple ("a banana") is completely different from the one people ate 60 years ago. And that they largely didn't exist in the United States grocery system 60 years before that.
> It's fascinating to think that such a staple ("a banana") is completely different from the one people ate 60 years ago.
The most interesting one to me is that US "bacon" and UK "bacon" are completely different things. But because of cultural crossover they get used for the same dishes, and people often don't realise the recipe they're working from was talking about something else.
I'm just a little bit older than the US bacon craze, which was born out of unsold pork bellies, themselves a consequence of the late 1980s "Pork: the other white meat" campaign (itself a response to healthier, leaner chicken's rise). There's no way to produce a loin without a belly, etc.
So ironically, the US turned to more UK-like pork cuts in the 1980s, and then advertising turned it back to full-fat pork belly bacon in the 90s!
i kind of wish i had experienced grocery shopping back when all the weird cuts were cheap.
these days, if anything what I would've considered off cuts growing up (wings, oxtail) are now more expensive than other parts in my area. I saw oxtails for $20 a pound the other day.
They were cheap off cuts because almost no one wanted them. Oxtails got popularized by celebrity chefs so theres a lot more demand than the supply can handle now.
Here in SoCal there’s such a large population of immigrants that use neck bones and chicken feet for stock that even those cuts have risen in price relative to the rest of the country. It’s gotten to the point where rib eye roasts and new york steaks are only a dollar or two a pound more expensive than meat for stock at my local halal market.
The other way of looking at that is that cheap weird cut meat prices were a consequence of inefficient meat allocation (supply of those ending up at retail grocery where there wasn't demand).
So, ignoring the behind the scene details and holding cattle price constant, cheap weird cuts made well-known cuts more expensive (all cuts having to sum to price of cow).
I believe the behind the scenes logistics system has gotten better at sending different parts of the cow to different places (e.g. restaurant, commercial packaged, etc) where there is demand.
Case in point: most retail grocery doesn't do full butchering anymore, as it's been centralized upstream.
The difference is in the defaults, not the product. There are two distinct cuts of pork used for bacon: belly and loin. In the US, belly is the default ‘bacon’, and to get bacon made from pork loin you need to look for ‘Canadian bacon’ (but that will have the fat all trimmed off) or ‘Irish bacon’, or you might find ‘back bacon’ in a butcher or deli counter. In the UK the default ‘bacon’ is back bacon, made from the loin. If you want belly meat you need to look for ‘streaky bacon’.
Weirdly I think this is a case where US FDA regulations are oddly strict about what can be sold as ‘bacon’ and how it has to be packaged (those weird little fat windows in the cardboard) which prevents back bacon being offered as a normal product.
They’re not completely different things. They’re both cured, and they both taste like bacon. Some companies “smoke” their bacon, or add various other flavors, in the US.
Smoked bacon is a thing in the UK too. Every store has both smoked and unsmoked back and streaky bacon.
But never having dealt with the raw product, only tasting the dried-to-a-crisp offering of every American eatery (from diner to five star hotel) I don't know whether it's the product or the preparation that's at fault
An anecdotal fact: the bananas I was buying at a market in Thailand when I visited the country tasted so much different (and for me, better) than the bananas I buy in an American supermarket, I am not sure I'd know it's a variant of the same plant if I did not see them.
Have you never grown peppers? It really is absurdly easy. The point though really isn't that everyone's just going to grow their own peppers; rather, it's that it's very easy to introduce an alternate supply of highly-variable jalapenos, because there aren't many barriers to producing them. There are urban garden companies in Chicago that produce lettuce right now and could probably produce jalapenos if anybody really cared enough.
Yeah, I've seen boston-area college students successfully grow szechuan peppers on a south facing (outdoor but sheltered) balcony - with exactly as much neglect as you'd expect from undergrads in a shared apartment. "Absurdly easy" is not an exaggeration.
Sichuan peppers are the fruits of a citrus tree, also known as prickly ash, not peppers at all. Also not ash, but also not something you'd grow on your balcony because they're covered in nasty thorns and second only to blackberries (brambles) in scratch-your-eyes-outness.
Seriously. I think it's the relatively dry fruit output + innate waxy toughness, but of all the bearing plants, peppers can take the most "Oops, I forgot to water you for days... weeks?"
That’s pretty good! Peppercorns are a bit harder they’re not from the nightshade family like peppers are. But I guess the end product is dried so maybe it’s fairly forgiving
Reliably spicy jalapenos have never been a thing, but you can optimize growing conditions for heat and produce a spicy cultivar if you want to go into business serving chileheads who want, like, hot, but not that hot?
(I get it, jalapenos have a particularly useful form factor; you can't really do a serrano relleno).
If the 'reply' button doesn't appear (happens for some reason when comment is recent, possibly 'flamewar' control) just click the '0 minutes ago' or whatever relative timestamp.
As someone that loves hot sauce, including fermenting my own, it's unfortunate that it does actually require growing your own if you want a lot of heat along with flavor. Using capsaicin extracts will give you heat, but often little flavor (or no flavor if you go hot enough).
If you're just making a fermented hot sauce, why not just use serranos? The serrano is basically the consistently hot jalapeno you're looking from; it's just less plump and so less useful as a popper or whatever. And, of course, if you really wanted heat, you'd be using scotch bonnets anyways.
Each of these chiles have very different flavors friend. Serranos and jalapeños are much closer than habaneros but still cleanly separated by bitterness, brightness and acridity.
Eg a grandmother’s salsa ranchera with jalapeño only is a much sweeter affair than when supplemented with serranos, and equally much less fruity than when pequins are used.
I think this is the biggest point a lot of people who aren't used to consistently spicy/hot food miss. Yes, the peppers will be hot but the flavors will be wildly different between them and that's the more interesting/important thing. The right pepper can really make a dish amazing, but just adding heat won't.
I don't know that jalapenos and serranos are different enough to say this about. Serranos are more vegetal, I guess? But jalapenos are pretty variable, especially depending on ripeness, and I would claim right now (without being able to back it up) that serranos fit into the spectrum of possible jalapenos (like: there is a jalapeno somewhere that tastes just like the median serrano), minus the capsaicin.
Which is what people are saying they want from a non-industrial jalapeno.
The boy has a rotavap in the basement, I just need to convince him to let me run up some peppers in it to do the comparison. :)
I don't think of cooked Serranos as too different from cooked Jalapenos as long as they haven't ripened too much and turned red. I made a large batch of pozole this weekend with jalapenos and it was disappointingly mild, I plan to add some serranos to the leftovers to bump the heat up a little bit.
Or go to any farmers market / specialty grocery. There are more varieties and more micro farmers of peppers than probably ever in humanity’s history. From not at all spicy to unheard new levels of spice. PuckerButt Pepper company is at the frontier of breeding new species for example
I mean the other obvious option is to use one of the other varieties of peppers that are known to be hotter: serranos, Thai bird chilis, habaneros, etc.
Today I learn that Brussel sprouts have changed on us. Odd, as I loved them as a kid, and still love them as an adult. Curious how genetic noticing that flavor shift is. Is it akin to how some folks hate cilantro?
And agreed that this all seems fine. The heat of these peppers is directly added to things that people want to have heat. I see some folks say they can taste differences, but I have stopped buying dips that are "hot" as they almost always taste the exact same, but have a burning flavor that lingers longer. Curious how much of this is my not being able to taste the differences, or others thinking that they can.
Yup it’s kinda like cilantro - you might not have the genes for tasting glucosinolates, the bitter compounds that have been bred down to lower levels in modern Brussels sprouts. Some people apparently don’t taste them, but they are very bitter to most.
This has me more curious, as I love "bitter" things. Was commenting in another thread that I hate arabica coffee, and most people's complaint on robusta is that it is bitter. Finally had some grapefruit for the first time in a long time recently. Still love that stuff. If a bit worried on how much it supposedly interacts with medicine.
> Curious how genetic noticing that flavor shift is. Is it akin to how some folks hate cilantro?
Yes. I'm one of these people, that stuff tastes like weird soap for me - but neither of my parents has that issue (and yes, my father clearly is my father), so the cilantro stuff is likely recessive.
If you have had Huy Fong Sriracha recently you’ll probably notice that it is less spicy than it used to be.
Apparently they were in a multi year lawsuit with their jalapeño pepper supplier based in SoCal that is specifically known for spiciness and they lost and started buying jalapeños elsewhere.
Then the pepper farmer started selling his own Sriracha sauce.
That's super weird, right? Because they could just dope the sriracha batches back to whatever level of heat they want. I make fermented hot sauce once a year, and I end up doing that too? And I'm a dummy?
Are we sure this isn't just a market shift thing? Like: maybe they lost some heat unintentionally or unknowingly, but then sales went up?
Speaking of fermented hot sauce, do you have some recommendations? I've been trying to find a way to recreate Frank's buffalo sauce but pretty much every recipe found online uses Frank's buffalo sauce itself as an ingredient :-). I suspect the secret is some long-running fermentation process sorcery.
Are you trying to make Frank's Buffalo Sauce or Frank's Hot Sauce?
Because the original Buffalo Sauce used hot sauce as an ingredient. While it's not known what original hot sauce was used when it was created, the staple hot sauce for buffalo wings has been Frank's for many decades. Buffalo sauce is essentially Frank's Hot Sauce, butter and depending some garlic powder. People can add a bit more too it, but the sauce really was hot sauce, butter and some powder.
Now if you're asking how to make Frank's Hot Sauce - yah that's a whole different thing. Which I have no idea of.
Serious Eats has you covered here. I use whole peppers, not a mash, and I do it in a small plastic kimchi bucket with an airlock. I simmer (reduce a little bit) because I'm a chicken, and because it's an opportunity to adjust the seasoning.
> today's (delicious) sprouts aren't the same plant as the (gross) sprouts of yore
For what it's worth, your (adult) tastes probably changed more than the vegetable itself. Even with the reduction in glucosinolates, few children would call brussels sprouts "delicious". Children are born with a preference for sweetness, while disliking bitter tastes. Both of these traits diminish as they reach adulthood. [0]
We also generally know how to prepare them better. Most people these days recommend and prefer them roasted and caramelized, and that is a world of difference from the boiled to death sprouts of yore.
Anecdotally, my young children both love brussels sprouts. They're actually one of the very few greens I can get them to consistently eat, other than green beans.
> Peppers are one of the easier and more forgiving things to grow yourself. Just grow your own or buy from a farmer's market.
There's only 5 species that make up the domesticated peppers. Most come from just 2: capsicum annuum (bell peppers, jalapenos, anaheims, and the vast majority of the rest) and capsicum chinense (scotch bonnet, habenero, ghost peppers, etc). [1]
Those 2 species will also cross-breed pretty well, and within a species there is of course no barrier for crossing. The best part of having a garden with a lot of pepper varieties is that next year's volunteers are going to be some fun mystery-cross, like cayanne looking pepper with no heat, or a super hot (but slightly mangled looking) hatch. Sometimes different seeds from a single pod may produce wildly different crosses - pollen from multiple plants may be on that bee!
So while you're absolutely correct that peppers are very forgiving[2] to grow yourself, amusingly that makes breeding your own jalapenos for next year a lot of extra effort. If you don't net them off from pollinators and hand pollinate, you will likely get unexpected results.
[2] my family has a joke that peppers are not forgiving, they are masochists - that is they seem to do better when you kind of just ignore them (to the point of not even weeding near them), unlike other plants that do even better when you pamper them.
As someone who does small scale food production (not with jalapeños) I appreciate it. The big salsa producers surely just have someone running a mass spec on site. Consistency is a lot harder for smaller producers who don’t have the budget for expensive machines/scientists and ready access to capsicum. (I actually do buy that in liquid form for one product, but not an oleo-resin, something water-soluble.)
In cooking for myself, I still appreciate it. I like heat more than nearly anyone, to the point where it’s borderline pathological, but I also like pepper flavor, and now I get to use more of it! When I come across a batch of less hot habaneros I buy all I can, they have a wonderful flavor and I’d like to use more of them.
> more into brussels sprouts now than you were when you were a kid
You're not wrong, though I actually prefer oldschool sprouts. I grew some a few years back and the nostalgia hit me like a train. Super rich, earthy, bitter, and perhaps a little tougher than what you get today... We ate them a lot growing up, and that was exactly how I remembered them, yet at the store they're more like tiny, slightly bitter cabbages. Still incredibly by all means, I really love them. I eat them all through winter. Even so, I do miss the more opinionated version from my youth.
One nice thing about modern sprouts is they tend to be shaped better and easier to cook consistently. The sprouts from when I was a kid were definitely less like perfect little cabbages, so cooking them now is quite a bit more convenient and reliable.
Be sure to check out Spanish Padrón peppers, if you haven't already. They're often served fried in olive oil and salted (see photo in Wikipedia article), as a very popular tapas.
I couldn't agree more - they are exceptional. One of the best bits about them other than the flavour, is that I think something like one in 10 or 12 peppers is hot. Pepper roulette!
I grew Apache chilis and there was definite variance - one year the green fruits were napalm, the next they literally tasted like bells (until they turned red...)
It depends. Variance can be a huge issue when cooking peppers into a dish. It's not just as simple as waiting to the end and testing heat levels. For most mass grown varieties they've gotten things to be pretty steady. Even though I agree it's disappointing for other reasons at least I don't have to worry that adding a 2nd habanero to a stew will make it inedible.
I wondered what this new 'broccolini' was everyone's talking about here, turns out it's just another pan-Atlantic vegetable name variation; it's AmE for tenderstem broccoli.
Has something similar been done with onions to make them sting less? Nowadays they don't bother me whereas when I was growing up, decades ago, I couldn't cut one without tears.
Yes, there are modern cultivars that have far lower levels, or in some cases none, of the irritating compounds. These cultivars only grown in certain conditions so in markets that have seasonal growing you’ll notice some times of the year you get tears and some you don’t.
Less of the lachrymator gets in your eyes if there's glasses in the way. A sharp knife also produces less lachrymator. If you keep your knives sharpener than your parents did, that'll do it
Oh no, all year round. A friend of mine even noticed he never liked tomatoes as a kid but now he has no issues since they're literally tasteless, and he comes from Greece so it's not a sun issue
Sounds like location (and with it tomato source/variety) is what's changed, not time (and tomatoes over it).
I always regret it if I get them out of season; in season they're still worth paying extra for, cheap bottom of the barrel supermarket tomatoes are just mildly flavoured water capsules. That's in the UK; for some reason even the cheapest in France has always seemed to beat anything we can get here.
yes that's the entire point of the discussion, they chose varieties based on quick growth, disease resistance, water needs, ease of transportation &c. taste isn't anywhere close to the top of the list
'source' as in obviously a different place in Greece vs. wherever they came from there to (US?)
'variety' as in among those that are available - maybe what you can get grown easily and cheaply in Greece/med is much better than that in the US, which is perhaps also local but necessarily (or for better yield) a different variety, so if you don't pay any attention to it you get something different.
My point is it's not just passage of time that changed but also where they came from. If you think all tomatoes everywhere are (now) tasteless and you're one of the few enlightened ones who have realised this, you are absolutely kidding yourself.
Agree with all the above. Also, I quite prefer not having super-hot peppers. I've known people who consume hot peppers and they eventually ended up with stomach issues. Maybe it does not affect everyone... In any event, I prefer milder flavors over something which overwhelms. Then again, I probably like cheeses that could overwhelm some people.
> Peppers are one of the easier and more forgiving things to grow yourself. Just grow your own or buy from a farmer's market.
They're pretty challenging and high effort, IMO, and certainly not worth the effort relative to just buying some. Jalapenos are like 7 cents each at the grocery store!
Really, though, the true innovation in brussels sprouts was figuring out that you could roast them with bacon and some maple or balsamic glaze. ("Yes, that would also make the box they came in taste good")
>Low-heat-low-variance is better for mass food production, because producers can just dose the capsaicin directly, which is something they can't do easily when every pepper is a wildcard.
As if simple math can't be used to average out the dose.
I find the variance in spiciness for peppers quite annoying. If the same packaged product can vary between "I don't even notice any spiciness" to "Too spicy for me, I have to throw it away" that is just wasteful.
Brussel sprouts are a bad example. They are the bastard product of hundred of years of human fuckery to turn the same plant into kale, sprouts, broccoli and more.
It's almost like brassica has a little knob that has been turned differently in various european cultures.
The variety looks huge but often if you pay close attention, they're really just scaled/rotated variants on each other. Romanesco is the one that looks like an actual fractal.
I got the same impression. There's no nefarious conspiracy to make shitty peppers for the tasteless masses. It just makes a lot more sense to make mild peppers, then add the capsaicin later on.
It'd be nice if you could still get a dice-roll-super-spicy jalapeno from the grocery store, though. I can't imagine my landlord would be keen on me growing jalapenos behind my building (or maybe they'd be fine with it! There's really only one way to find out).
I love to ferment my own hot sauces so I am always on the lookout for new varieties of extremely hot peppers.
There is one, one!, pepperhead in the Bay Area farmers markets. You only hear hushed whispers of him at the other markets, but through a various sequence of flatteries and bribes you will be lead to him at the Clement Street farmer’s market on Sundays. (as of 2024)
Jamil at Raised Roots makes some of the most delicious fermented hot sauces made with only the showcase pepper, salt, water and garlic.
I wish I could give him some traffic but it seems his web presence is a bit outdated, so if you’re in the area check out the scorpion and fatalii. They are absolutely delicious.
As I understand it it’s an “urban farm” so it has multiple plots around the city of Oakland. Meaning the peppers are grown outside, meaning they are seasonal. So raised roots only sells peppers at harvest in November, but you can get the sauce all year round.
That’s the state of wanting hot peppers living in San Francisco.
It's interesting how bad incentives are when something with qualitative differences (flavor, heat) is sold by the pound. Making it more palatable expands the market up to a point, but so does requiring more peppers generally.
The most durable countermeasure seems to be totally outside of the purview of economics: building up a culture of caring about the product. Like tomatoes in Italy, or coffee beans among coffee lovers.
For heat we've mostly had to rely on serrano or (when in season here) the Hungarian wax pepper (varies wildly between 1k and 15k scoville)
Are the incentives "bad", really? It seems like they are getting less spicy because that is what most people want. There seems to be an assumption that because Big Jalapeño are changing the flavour it must be for the worse. Personally I prefer spicier peppers but I am definitely an outlier amongst my friends at least.
I don't know that we need countermeasures, as such. I think it's fine to have a very common, affordable product that is predictable and palatable to the masses alongside other more niche variants which are popular with "enthusiasts" (and therefore might be less widely available and more expensive).
That's kind of how it is with coffee. Most people get theirs from Starbucks or some other big chain. I hate that stuff but they clearly like it, and I don't begrudge them it. As long as I am able to get my fruity single-origin light roasts.
I guess maybe you don't have those niches in jalapeños (I don't know where I would go to get a spicier jalapeño) but as you mention, there are other peppers we can look to if spice is what we want.
You make the assumption that consumers want what they buy, consumers will just buy what's in front of them. In places dominated by big supermarket chains consumers have a lot less choice than it seems, as marginal costs for shopping a few items from elsewhere are high.
Coffee is a fun one, as I absolutely hate the taste of arabica coffee. And that seems to be universally the preferred family of coffee for the everyone.
I mean, I'll take a latte either way. But if I'm drinking straight espresso or an americano, yeah, pretty much has to be robusta. Luckily, what has really saved money is that I don't get out of the house that often.
Amusingly, it didn't save money to get started on a good espresso machine. That said, a few years in and I think it has more than paid for itself. I hate how hard it seems to be to find whole bean robusta. About the only reliable way I know is to buy death wish.
There are agricultural products where price per bushel has to do with some grading, which is tested along in the supply chain. If I can easily, quickly, cheaply test for any trait, its value can be priced in. See how much apples have improved, given that we could tell varieties on sight, and people learn the properties that come with each variety.
If you could tell whether a pepper's value in the scoville scale before buying, or the supermarket could accurately label things cheaply. the price differential, and therefore the quality, will follow.
Many of the people in this threat at quoting their younger years. i didnt hear anyone quote,
> Taste Bud Density: Children have more taste buds than adults, and these are more sensitive. This heightened sensitivity can make certain flavors, especially bitter ones, more intense for children. The number of taste buds decreases as people age, which can lead to changes in taste sensitivity and preferences.
I actually could barely taste at all as a child due to a very severely deviated septum. When I got it fixed in my early twenties, my tastes changed dramatically
I've been on a salsa making kick lately and use chipotles, which are dried and smoked jalapenos. Raw plain jalapenos were never that attractive to me although I did eat them whole frequently when I worked in a mexican restaurant...
The chipotles I get are plenty spicy- 3 small chipotles is enough heat for an almost uncomfortably spicy salsa (in this case, I'm talking about a salsa is made just from the chipotle flesh and some spices and water). If it wasn't spicy enough, I'd add arbol chiles (just one) which are painfully spicy.
I don’t like more than a little spicy but I discovered that if you stand the jalapeño up and cut vertical panels leaving the core and seeds behind, they are essentially just sweet peppers with a little kick. It seems that almost all of the heat is in the seeds and the plith.
As mentioned in another comment, you are correct that by far the highest concentration is in the pith/placenta (~90% typically). The seeds have a relatively low capsaicin concentration, but their surface gets spicy from being in direct contact with the pith.
But practically speaking, you're right. You can just cut away the outsides and get most of the flavor without much spice at all.
My experience is most peppers pack the most heat in their seeds. Some peppers have a hot oil that can get on your fingers and start tingling minutes/couple hours later.
I thought the same, but it's supposed to be from the pith. I just think that since the seeds grow off the pith, you get some of that pith with the seeds. I've also felt the horror and pain of using the restroom hours after dealing with peppers, not realizing the mistake that I had made. Never again though, that was a teaching moment for life!
Yeah it's been interesting for me to watch as my kid eats fresh restaurant salsa with chunks of jalapeño in it. I remembering wondering if I ate jalapeño chunks at that age; it makes sense that this is just a trend in the spice level, not my kid being a spice-monger.
Wow, I was just telling my partner last week that the Jalapeños I'd bought were not spicy and it seemed like it was happening more and more often. I love Jalapeños with cheese and crackers and it sucks to cut up a whole jalapeño only to find I might as well just used a green pepper.
I make salsa once a month and have noticed this the last couple years. Occasionally get a spicy batch, but more often am adding habaneros to bring up the heat.
I made a verde for the Super Bowl a couple weeks ago and tried to keep it mild since I didn't know everyone's preferences. Even after 3 jalapenos in a small batch of salsa, it had almost zero spice (commented on by party goers - still tasty though).
Last week on the show Chrissy and Dave Dine Out, the chef of an Ethiopian restaurant in LA commented how she quit using jalapenos because they're not spicy anymore and opts for serranos in her dishes instead.
Anyway, I kept thinking I was getting weak batches/unlukcy in my jalapeno selection, but I guess I need to start going for serranos.
"least"? it's not least, it's "not at all" spicy, there's no capsaicin in bell peppers so while they're part of the same family of plants/fruits in scientific terms, in the world of cooking they might as well be considered an alien plant that has nothing to do with the others.
In French, we have a (generic, as in encompassing the whole family of plants) word specifically designating all members of the capsicum family that are spicy: Piments, so as to exclude Bell Peppers (which we call Poivron) from any conversation about this stuff.
Bell Peppers can be considered a main ingredient and focus (in weight) in a recipe, while the others are only ever used as spices.
You might be interested in this YouTube video which discusses the issues of 'big seed' in regards to tomatoes. I'd imagine the same applies to any commercially grown crops (another comment mentioned that there is basically only one commercial variety of bananas), which would explain why jalapenos are less spicy than they used to be.
- Almost all commercially grown crops are from hybrids, which means two varieties bred to produce a new variety with the selected characteristics of both.
- The characteristics that are chosen are those which are most commercially viable: long shelf life, visually appealing, size uniformity - these are often at the detrement of other characteristics such as flavor, nutrients or in this case heat
- Hybrid plants usually do not 'remain true', meaning their offspring will not have the same characteristics. This means farmers need to buy new seed each year to maintain the same characteristics. This results in hybrid seeds being very valuable - some are worth 10x more per kg than gold.
- Hybrids seeds are produced by pollinating plants by hand. This is a time consuming process, and usually done in low income countries. That means labour laws are often ignored, and child labour is a big problem.
Same thing with mustard. Mustard used to be spicy, then "yellow mustard" came out, then yellow mustard became mustard, then actual mustard became "spicy mustard".
what you refer to as "yellow mustard" or just plain "mustard" australia at the very least labels as "american mustard", and then label the "spicy mustard" as "english mustard"
If you buy mustard seed there is often yellow and red seeds. Use yellow variety plus turmeric and vinegar for your standard American mustard. Use red and vinegar and beer/wine for your brown mustards. In my experience there is little difference in heat, what matters is time to mellow. The older the mustard the less spicy horseradish/wasabi sensation. Perhaps it’s oxidation.
I'm with you. They are so much like jalapeños, just smaller, spicier and usually really consistent. Although recently I had a batch that was disappointingly mild.
I think serranos must be very close genetically to jalapeños.
I love jalapenos/chipotles but there are so many great pepper varieties out there, and I sometimes wonder why they are not mass produced as much.
For instance, I love hatch (Nex Mexico) chiles, but they seem quite difficult to get fresh outside of the region or at least during a very particular time of year. They are so much more flavorful than jalepenos imo, and have a similar amount of spice (not much). At least they are typically available canned, and they are still great.
One exception are Mrs. Renfro's pickled jalapeños, a Tex-Mex staple for decades. They're still quite hot. I wonder if they have special grower relationships?
I've always thought the California and Mexico weak peppers I got had more to do with irrigation practices than the varietal. But maybe it's both!
You can make pickled jalapenos as hot as you want them to be, regardless of the heat in the peppers themselves; a pickled jalapeno vendor is exactly the kind of customer that wants low-heat, low-variance jalapenos.
I used to get jalapeños from a certain “farmers market” that were so hot [0]. By far the hottest jalapeños I’ve ever had. Had to be very careful with them. It does make you wonder where they come from. I wanted to give them to people that mock the heat of jalapeños.
[0] This was an east coast farmers market and wasnt literally farmers selling their produce. I believe a lot of it was trucked up from Mexico.
I remember the jalapenos from a local farm, which I haven't had for too long. They were all spicy, but it was well known that about 1:4 were wicked, very comparable to a conventional habanero.
I ferment habaneros and when I do, it's usually several pounds. I process by hand without gloves and evidence of this persists for days. It's only painful when exposed to heat, eg shower, handwash, etc. But as an avid capsaicin reservoir, I can attest that proper jalapenos can be surprisingly 'hot', while the typical store bought versions often can barely look a poblano in the eye without breaking a sweat.
Anecdote: Jalapenos really bother me, but I love them. I don't know what it is about them, but they give me days of problems when I eat more than a couple bites.
I can eat much spicier capsicum peppers than Jalapenos, and fresno peppers seem to give me no problems at all (which are the nearest cousin I've found to Jalapenos).
Does anyone know what I can do? Does my body's reaction to Jalapenos have to do with how ripe they are (green vs. red?), or is there any other reason or explanation by Jalapenos bother me but other peppers dont?
Those high variance peppers were the lifeblood of some recipes though. You need the occasional 5x hot pepper. Like I recently put 8 jalapeños and 20 habaneros into a seafood taco dish I used to make when craving spice and it wasn’t even a quarter as hot as it used to be. Buying from the same grocery store too. In the past I was running to get milk and sweating my face off. This time I had to add Pain 100% hot sauce onto the finished product. Not even a decade passed.
I’ve lost all confidence in my hot sauce recipe too now.
Being raised in New Mexico, I cannot stand jalapenos. They infect everything vaguely "mexican" themed, and have basically forced me to buy the mildest sauces and whatnot, only to have to add hatch peppers to bring them up to a suitable level of spice. And even then, with the more mild jalapenos we have now, you'll find them in reformulations of mild sauces, and so on a single taste I get that "hot screen door/cat vomit" flavor shining through. So I frequently have to change brands.
I miss territorial house salsa, but Pace killed them over 20 years ago, so I should probably move on
> I miss territorial house salsa, but Pace killed them over 20 years ago, so I should probably move on
I like El Pinto salsa.
As something of a counterpoint to another comment thread here, I find that their "medium" salsa is fairly hot and also richly flavored, while their "hot" salsa is hot but not flavored.
They're good, but they still put Jalapeños into many, if not most, of their salsas. I'll check the labels, and buy if its not in there, but that's become rarer and rarer.
For a while there was a "Hatch" branded salsa, which, naturally, only had Hatch peppers in it, but my local store seems to have rotated them out of stock.
The article kind of mentions this but I think most professionals have shifted to serranos except when they want the big slices for a garnish or something. The shift was well underway when I was still cooking in the late 2000s, though I mostly heard consistency as the reason rather than heat.
yeah it's always a crap shoot with jalapeños, sometimes they're mild, hot, or like really freaking hot. I love serranos though, dice up a few and throw into a standard chicken and rice casserole recipe. that's really good stuff.
around 1999/2000 we made frequent trips to Texas to visit family and I got addicted to then huge packs of jalapeño chips, they were so good I brought whole cartful back to New Zealand. The further I flew (2 stop overs coz I am cheap) the further Texans with cowboy hats in airport lounge would walk across to congratulate me on my hoard. Wonderful stuff. And they were spicy. I hope it wasn't just sprayed with some artificial flavouring. I'd love some modern day recommendations of a good jalapeño chips too, fellow connoisseurs of fine jalapeño chips.
It's mostly neither, but rather it tends to be concentrated in the 'ribs', that whitish tissue inside the pepper. Seeds tend to have some of that connective tissue on and around them, or to come in contact with it more, and so have a reputation for heat.
I love spicy food, but I actually appreciate where jalapeños have ended up because I have family that _don't_ like spicy food so it's a good compromise for me.
Typically you order the dish and it comes with the sauce "baked in". The only time that you physically add salsa yourself is when you are eating tacos or a few other dishes, and even then, all of that is going to be prepared fresh, in-house. Even at home you prepare it yourself. The idea of buying a distinct sauce at a store to keep on your counter or in the fridge is kind of foreign.
Here are the key points about why jalapeño peppers are less spicy than ever:
1. Jalapeño peppers are deliberately being bred to be bigger, shinier, prettier - but less spicy and less flavorful. This is driven by demand from the processed food industry for consistency.
2. About 60% of jalapeños go to processing plants for things like canned peppers, salsas, sauces, etc. These companies want predictable, mild heat levels so they can accurately label products as "mild," "medium," "hot."
3. In the last 20 years, a very popular jalapeño variety called TAM II has taken over much of the market. It was specifically bred to be huge, shiny, and very mild - less than 10% as spicy as traditional jalapeños.
4. The invention and popularity of TAM jalapeños is making the overall jalapeño gene pool larger but milder. Hotter, more flavorful varieties are losing ground.
5. There are still hotter jalapeño varieties like Mitla and Early jalapeños, but many restaurants and home cooks don't know to ask for specific pepper breeds.
6. Some experts draw comparisons to the tomato industry - mass-produced tomatoes lost flavor, but heirlooms are bringing it back. Perhaps hotter heirloom pepper varieties could also regain popularity.
I really wish consumers understood how produce works. :-(
There is no single food called "a Jalapeño". In the Solanaceae family, in the Capsicum genus, in the annuum sub-genus, there are dozens of hybrid and cultivar fruiting plants, which are all referred to as "Jalapeño". They all have different properties in how they grow and what they turn into. This includes taste, size, color, shape, and spiciness. (https://www.thechileman.org/results.php?chile=1&find=Jalapen...)
If you want to buy "a Jalapeño", or any kind of produce, and have a reliable experience, you can't just wander into a random store and pick up a generic name for 40 different cultivars, made god knows where and how, shipped to your neighborhood god knows how, and expect that the thing you selected is exactly what you wanted.
Imagine you want a burger. You go to the Big Burger Mart. From a giant bin labeled "Burger", you pick one Burger. You take it home and eat it. Will it be the burger you expected, from the place you expected, tasting the way you expected? Maybe not! But it's An Burger! You didn't seem to care what kind of burger it was when you picked it out of a big bin called "Burger". You didn't ask where it came from, how it was prepared, how long it's been sitting there, etc. So you can't really expect anything but "Generic Burger", which personally doesn't sound very tasty.
To get the produce you expect, you should buy a specific cultivar of produce from a reliable producer. And you're probably gonna need to buy it locally, because the food logistics chain delivering a pepper from Chile all the way to Nebraska is not going to result in an ideal pepper. Another way to get what you expect is to grow it yourself. Many jalapeño cultivars (and other peppers!) grow well in containers. If you want to skip the whole gardening thing, you can buy a pre-grown bush of jalapeño online from a nursery like Bonnie, and just keep it alive and enjoy fresh peppers indefinitely.
I actually feel bad for the supermarkets. They have to read the minds of customers that demand so much, feed back that information to growers about what to grow, and then get it into the stores, with 365-days-a-year perfect consistency, unblemished, "ripe", and tasty. It's an impossible task. Yet they pull it off, even to the point that people have grown up their whole lives not knowing what it is they're buying or how it gets into their shopping cart. But that doesn't stop people complaining about it.
It's common when talking about peppers since there are so many varieties of the same species. I guess cultivar, variety, and breed are mostly synonymous except that cultivar (to me) implies that human intervention was involved in the selecting. Variety can be used to mean the same thing but naturally without human intervention. And breed seems to be a more colloquial term that encompasses both of these.
I'm not entirely sure this is always accurate, but that is the distinction afaik.
I get not a lot of people here have been growing their own peppers. I say that because if one goes to their local garden center right now and buys a jalapeño seedling, puts it in a fairly large pot and gives it a regular dose of N and a daily dose of water and puts outside in the 65-80F weather for the next few months it will produce peppers that are very large and taste pretty similar to the ones in the grocery store. Pick, them just as they reach an couple inches in length before they start to ripen and taste them.
Then if one lives in the south, brings it inside next year over the winter, and stop fertilizing it, and reduces watering it to once a week or so, it will again produce peppers next year that will be a lot hotter, but during the summer if you live in somewhere its getting over 100F daily, stop watering it until it starts to drop its leaves and pull it back from the brink of death ever couple weeks over the summer. The last peppers to set in the late spring early summer will only grow to be an inch or so long and the plant will stubbornly refuse to drop them even when they start to shrivel a bit and its lost most of its full size leaves only sprouting 1/4" long leaves during the short periods of recovery when the soil isn't bone dry. Then after a couple months when those peppers get really dark before they start to turn red, pick one and taste it.
The second year that plan will produce peppers hotter than probably anything most people have ever tasted. But, the plant will get strong and gnarly, continue to mistreat it for another year or two and what you will have is a pepper that no one can actually eat.
In my 20's I found pleasure in sampling top ten lists of hottest hot sauces and peppers, but nothing prepared me for the pepper I pulled off a ~5 year old jalapeño plant I had largely been ignoring all summer long and hadn't been fertilized since it was a seedling. A single bite, and about two chews, and I went into an upper body "hickup" that might be better described as a repeating upper body spasm, and a mouth burn unlike anything I've ever experience before or since. Those are peppers one should pick with gloves.
Pepper genetics or even variety aren't the largest dictator of how hot a pepper is. A bigger factor is how they are grown. Give a young plant a 70-80F pleasant environment, plenty of water and nutrient rich soil and they produce lots and lots of peppers that vary only slightly in heat based on their variety. Exactly what a commercial grower will do to maximize yield. Keep a plant on life support for multiple years and it will be an ugly thing, producing only a few peppers that grow slowly and ripen slowly over months, stress it to the point where its largely dropped all its leaves and only has a few small leaves baked daily in full 100F+ sun and it will produce peppers that are by themselves in-edible.
I was in Mexico a few years ago and my I remember one of my kids pointing out that the Jalapeño Doritos here were spicier. Ive growing jalapeños for years in the north of US and they come out mild. I always thought to be related to cooler rainier climate.
As a frequent eater of jalapeños and other raw peppers, this is true and frustrating.
I am more dissatisfied with the constant mold than with the occasional spicy but as a free market capitalist how can I single the market when supply side has made a decision.
I'd argue that the real reason is that peppers are now mass produced in clean, bug-free, environments.
Which means: No bug bites, no spice.
If you grow peppers indoors where no bugs are, they tend to be a very mild produce. If you put them outside (and have enough insects around), they get much more spicy.
Of course the usage of pesticides contributes to that effect, due to bugs not having a chance to bite the fruits anymore.
They release enzymes necessary for the spice/acid production. The acid counteracts those enzymes.
If you cut open peppers, you can see the black veins which were bit by bugs, those are the ones containing the carbon acid.
A better way to protect them against virusses but not against bugs that won't harm them is by combining the top of peppers with the root of potatoes, and by using moss to heal the cuts where you combined them (e.g. with a toothpick)
Of course that won't work on an industrial scale, hence them favoring pesticides.
I've read that slightly dehydrating your plants as they fruit is developing helps increase the capsaicin. You can also blend up the peppers and spray them down, which seems to agitate the peppers, and possibly send a chemical signal for the plant to start produce more capsaicin (although that's all been anecdotal evidence to my knowledge).
The bites themselves don’t cause the plant to produce more capsaicin. It’s natural selection - plants in areas with lots of insects end up producing more capsaicin as a means of protecting themselves. They are hotter, and insects will not bite them as a result.
Happy to be proven wrong if you have sources saying otherwise, but I’m quite certain this is the science behind it.
This is basically the same as arguing that exposure to sunlight won't darken your skin, but it will mean that natural selection gives your descendants darker skin.
There is every reason to expect that a plant's defenses against predation will be more active the more predation it experiences.
Melanin is produced as a reaction to UV exposure. Capsaicin is not produced as a reaction to bug bites. This is basic Darwinism vs Lamarckism, evolutionary pressure vs the idea of inheriting acquired traits.
The spice is an evolved defense mechanism, so if it's not needed, the peppers eventually stop producing it. Couple that with us intentionally selecting for things other than spice, and within a few generations you have a less spicy pepper.
Note I'm not any kind of qualified to talk on this topic. I'm sure someone can give a better & more accurate answer!
It's indeed a defense mechanism, but (from what I understand) it has less to do with bugs and more to do with mammals; pepper plants started surrounding the seeds with capsaicin to ward off mammals (which chew up and destroy the seeds) while still being palatable to birds (which ingest the seeds whole and "drop them off" elsewhere).
Then a certain species of primate decided "Grug inflict pain on self, makes Grug happy" and the rest is history.
No problem for birds either who don't have the taste buds for capsaicin. I had to buy spicy bird food for a while to ward off the squirrels. A little cruel maybe.
The summarized version was that they've selected for milder more consistently flavored jalapeños for mass manufacturing purposes where the companies using the peppers in their products prefer to control the level of spice with capsaicin extract.
Right. But the premise of the article is that there is unmet demand in the fresh jalapeño market for a high-heat pepper.
Sure, for cooking and processed foods a consistent pepper makes sense. But why are there not peppers being produced for their heat to fit this demand, like we do with other crops. It's why we use less chemicals for human corn than we do feed corn, because it affects the taste. Can't we do the same with our peppas
> But the premise of the article is that there is unmet demand in the fresh jalapeño market for a high-heat pepper.
That wouldn't really be related to a surge in demand for heat. Jalapeños bring a distinctive flavor that other chiles do not possess; I avoid them like the plague.
But I like normal chiles! I go through large quantities of Thai peppers.
For there to be a lot of unmet demand for high-heat jalapeños, you'd need to demonstrate that the people who want heat and the people who want jalapeños have significant overlap.
You definitely mean United States. the "cultural" parts of NA still have heritage varieties of tomato that taste great. same deal with corn, the US corn products are terrible and bland. though my understanding is that nixtamilized corn isn't very easy to access in europe, so y'all might not even know what i'm talking about!
There are second-order effects, like drip irrigation and cultivation techniques that optimize for shape, size, and color over heat --- but those are enabled by the industrial jalapeno's new position in the production chain. The peppers just aren't the point where the heat is introduced anymore; that happens later. Might as well optimize for good looking peppers.
This seems fine? Peppers are one of the easier and more forgiving things to grow yourself. Just grow your own or buy from a farmer's market.
Moments later, after reading the thread
This kind of stuff really seems to piss people off, but when you think about the disempowerment of the jalapeno, try to keep in mind that the same industrial processes have performed unalloyed positive things. Have you noticed that you're way more into brussels sprouts now than you were when you were a kid? If you're a GenX-er or a Millenial, that's because today's (delicious) sprouts aren't the same plant as the (gross) sprouts of yore. Same deal with broccolini, which hadn't even been invented until after your birthday (for most of you).