Over the weekend my eldest child and her family were here, and we adults were talking about hot peppers. One of the younger people was Googling to find which is considered the hottest pepper* and asked, “Why are all of the really hot peppers red?” which caused me, a gardener, to reply that even jalapeños will ripen to red if left on the bush. After much denial that jalapeños turn red, with Google providing the fact that yes, they do, my eldest then threw down and told me that no one ever thinks that jalapeños could be anything other than green, and challenged me to find even one person in a hundred who is cognizant of the fact that a fully ripened on the vine jalapeño is red, not green. If I can’t find people who know this here, then I am probably not going to find them elsewhere. I need validation fellow Dopers!
*It seems the Carolina Reaper still holds the title.
Yes, jalapeño peppers turn red when ripe, just like bell peppers.
You don’t have to be a gardener to know this - the bin of jalapeños at the grocery store often includes at least one that’s starting to blush around the edges.
It is my current understanding that Jalapenos turn red when ripe. I wouldn’t be surprised to find I was wrong. I also thought the red ones were actually less spicy than the green ones. Is that true?
All the hot peppers I’ve ever grown change colour. Not always to red but certainly from bright green. Jalapeños are no exception. There may be ones out there that remain green throughout but I’ve not come across them.
As someone with no palate for spicy flavours, I’d never really thought about it before, so neither of the poll options is quite right for me (yes, I’m being that guy). My answer is that until reading the OP, I didn’t know, but I wouldn’t have forcefully claimed that they could never be red.
I certainly knew that some jalapenos are red. I didn’t know it was a function of maturity though. I thoughts it was simply a matter of different strains in exactly the same way that some apples are red and some are green.
yep, I knew that, because I grow them every year. they don’t get any hotter when they turn red, but their flavor changes akin to red bell pepper vs. green.
My answer to “Are you aware that green jalapeños will ripen to red if left on the bush?” is: Now I do. I wasn’t aware of it before, but it doesn’t surprise me.
I don’t like hot things, so I don’t keep track of peppers. I knew that they turned red, but would not have been surprised to learn that they were called something else once that happened.
I’m aware now, but it was knowledge I did not have for a long time. I believed the red and yellow varieties of any pepper were different variations. I first learned this was not true of bell peppers.
and other places Google turned up feel there are a couple varieties that never turn red. I didn’t go much further than surface research being of the same mind as you until this moment.
