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Back to the Forum Archives In the world of garden peppers there are two basic types, hot and not! This piece is about my ongoing love affair with the hot ones. The generic name for these peppers is chili peppers or usually just chilies. I am not a complete crazy about this. Blisters on the tongue is not my idea of a gourmet treat. I prefer what I like to call spicy peppers. The idea is to have a spicy crisp snack item along with my cheese and Chianti. I still want to taste the cheese and Chianti. So, how do you tell a mildly hot (spicy) pepper from the man killers? There is a scientific way to measure the heat of peppers though many of the seed catalogs seem never to have heard of it. They are more inclined to use soft words like tangy, hot, very hot, mild, spicy, etcetera, rather than the scientific Scoville unit. Well, what the heck is a Scoville unit? By looking it up I discovered that Scoville was a real person. In fact, Wilbur Scoville was a Parke Davis chemist back in 1912 when he developed a way of testing peppers for heat. This came to be known as the Scoville Organoleptic Test. It was a simple process of diluting ground chiles with sugar water until tasters could detect no heat. The dilution required for this produced a number which was assigned as the Scoville units for that particular chili. One could wonder how hard this was on the tasters. Not everyone liked Wilbur's test. They said counting of peoples tastes as it did was a bit too subjective. In its place the test now used is called the High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) test. Before we get carried away with words chromatography is just a scientific technique for separating complex chemical mixtures. For chilies, what is separated are the chemicals called capsaicinoids. These are the oils which cause the heat in the chilies. So extracting these oils allows a very accurate measure of the heat of the chile. Even so, we still state our results in terms of the Scoville scale. All hot peppers contain capsaicinoids. They are not what give the flavor to the pepper. In fact, they have no flavor or odor. We detect them though our taste buds only because they are hot. They cause a warm or even a burning sensation. The flavors come from other factors. The flavor is what cause me to prefer a fresh Jalapeno pepper over a fresh Hungarian Wax pepper though they are adjacent on the Scoville scale. The chemicals that cause the heat are produced in the ribs of the pepper and sometimes the seeds. The actual flesh of the pepper contains very little if any capsaicinoid and is not particularly hot. Thus, if you remove the ribs and seeds you can turn a hot pepper into a not-so-hot pepper. Now this gets me to another point of dealing with hot peppers. It is a very good idea to wear latex gloves when cutting and cleaning them. Otherwise, real damage could result from touching the eyes or any mucus membrane while messing with hot peppers. Even washing with soap and water may not remove all of the oils from the skin. I like to use those surgical gloves that still allow some sense of touch. The Capsaicinoid in a pepper is measured in parts per million. These parts per million are equivalent to our Scoville heat units such that one part per million is equivalent to 15 Scoville units. Pure capsaicin has a Scoville heat unit score of 16 million. That is very hot indeed. Now, when rating peppers, we must understand the Scoville measurements will not be an absolute number for any particular pepper. Each pepper will have a range of values depending mostly on environmental factors. Pepper plants will grow better and produce hotter peppers in a hot dry climate, like that of Mexico. Thus, the Scoville value for a type of pepper will be stated as a range. As a result of all these tests, the chile peppers can be ranked according to their Scoville range. Although there is an ongoing snorting contest about which is the hottest pepper, the Habanero usually wins. The main contenders are hybrids of Scotch Bonnet and Thai peppers. Here is my partial list of chilies with their Scoville ratings. Habanero 200,000 to 300,000 units. For sure, there are many more varieties of chili peppers. This is just a sample that shows the hot end and also includes the ones I like. As I indicated, I do not like the top four here at all. Three of the others I do like and grow in my garden. I use, but no longer grow the Cayenne pepper. I suspect most people have used this pepper dried and ground as a spice in various foods. I do grow and pickle the Hungarian Wax peppers for those long winters when fresh peppers are poor pickings in the local markets. To control the heat, I include some sweet yellow wax peppers in each pickling batch in a ratio of two hot to one sweet. What are these peppers good for? They go very well with almost any sandwich for a noon time snack because they remain crisp after pickling. Another dandy treat, in my opinion, is a peanut butter and pickled Hungarian wax pepper sandwich. I will admit I'm kind of goofy. I also like peanut butter and sliced sweet onion sandwiches. Also, one of my favorite sandwiches is the one slice tomato and cheese sandwich. I grow large beefsteak type tomatoes just for this purpose. On this sandwich I like lots of mayo on a 1&1/2 to 2 inch thick slice of tomato with a slice of cheddar cheese. This is what Lawrence Sanders calls a wet sandwich. You eat this thing standing up over the sink. I also grow the Jalapeno peppers. The variety I choose is called Mucho Nacho. They are larger than any other Jalapeno I have found. That makes them easier to seed and clean. In the summer this is my favorite lunchtime complementary fresh vegetable. I also like them as poppers. That's a Jalapeno stuffed with Mozzarella, breaded, and fried in oil. Preparing them is a real pain. I have found the best way to get them is to order them in a restaurant. The other hot pepper I grow is a variety of the Anaheim Green Chili called Garden Salsa. Salsa is exactly what I use it for. I make and bottle my own salsa for all things Mexican. This stuff is also good on omelets and meatloaf. Try it! The handy thing about this pepper is I can chop it in my food processor and add it to the salsa batch with little danger of overdoing it. It is not extremely hot, but it does have the good salsa flavor. Now let me dispel one bit of nonsense. Some bad advice I have
heard is this. In order to douse the heat when eating chili peppers,
try drinking milk or eating ice cream or yoghourt. These dairy
products are especially effective at breaking down the Capsaicin
oils, which are not soluble in water. Let me just say, that is
dumb. It would really spoil the flavor of the peppers and whatever
else you are having with them. It would be like mixing Bourbon
or Scotch with grape soda or putting Brussels Sprouts on Pizza.
Let me tell you, bread, as in sandwich, or cheese, as in Gouda,
will work as well and are far superior in snack value.
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