Here you go. I grow peppers; jalapeños among others.
Green is an immature color in both sweet and hot peppers. Some varieties (by which I mean specific cultivars, not general types – there are a lot of cultivars of jalapeños, for instance, some of which aren’t even hot) are bred to stay green as long as possible, as the intention is to harvest and market them that way. Other varieties are bred to get to full color quickly.
Green is not the only immature color, and red isn’t the only full ripe color.
Some peppers are yellow as an unripe color and eventually turn red; but some others (including again both some hots and some sweets) are yellow or gold or orange as a full ripe color, with full ripe flavor and nutrition, and of course ripe seed.
A few are a chocolatey brown color; these may ripen red. I’m not sure whether any are brown as a full ripe color. I’ve never had much luck with the chocolates, and gave up trying.
There are a few varieties that are purple, either to start with or as an intermediary color between green and red ripe. To the best of my knowledge, there aren’t any that are purple at full ripeness – if anyone knows of any, please let me know! I’d love to sell them.
Heat and color aren’t particularly related. There are red ripening peppers all the way along the heat spectrum from entirely sweet to quite hot. Ditto gold ripening. Ditto purple, though again the purple ones will eventually ripen red.
Some varieties of hot peppers do seem to get a little less hot as they finish ripening, maybe because sugars are building up in the fruit and counteract some of the heat; others don’t seem to do that.
Some peppers can be typically mild, but occasionally produce fruit that is extraordinarily hot. I ordered stuffed Hatch peppers once at MadMex. The waitresses saw me getting uncomfortable, perspiring, turning red, and quickly brought a water refill.
I was offered a replacement after she told me about the rare super hot Hatch. A waiter stopped and joined the conversation, as he was interested in the situation. I cut the pepper in half, scooped some onto a spare plate, and he tried it. The two of us ate and enjoyed the pepper, but we both sweated. My entree was comped, and the waitress brought my son some kind of treat.
Thank you to all who have participated, you haven’t let me down! I’ll be sending a link to this thread to my daughter. Also, thank you for the comments wrt the poll options; this was my first poll, I’ll know better in the future.
Some grocery stores around here offer both red and green jalapenos. There is usually a large bin of greens and the reds are in a much smaller container. The reds are significantly more expensive, maybe they have a short shelf life?
Of course! At my local grocery, they even sell them in their red state a few times a year, and even in the green batches you will sometimes see jalapeños in latter stages of ripeness, as they start turning red.
I assumed that all peppers turn red or deeper yellow/orange when ripe. I won’t even buy green (unripe) bell peppers, I wait for the red ones in late summer. I don’t like hot peppers but I know how peppers grow.
There is a interesting variety that doesn’t turn red. Padron Pepper is the Russian roulette pepper grown in Spain (Padron Spain). Most all on a plant are sweet, but randomly one will be very hot. None are red and the hot one is visually indistinguishable from the rest.
I don’t think of jalapeños as anything but green, but perhaps I have seen some red ones.
Unless they’re moritas, which according to this, are just smoked less and still a little pliable. I don’t claim to be an expert but all of the smoked and dried jalapenos I’ve seen sold in bags are labeled morita and all the products sold canned in adobo are labeled chipotle.
I didn’t know this was a jalapeno based sauce and would have guessed it was not. Trader Joe’s has a fantastic jalapeno sauce that’s also a deep red color.
Are you sure it never turns red, as opposed to just being slow to do so and being ordinarily harvested at green stage? I haven’t grown this one, but I did find the below (the first site I know and they’re generally reliable, the second site I don’t know about one way or the other.)
I grow them, so I’ve seen them turn red. It’s better to pick them green to maximize productivity of quality peppers but sometimes you’ve got enough, even after throwing a bunch into bags in the freezer, that you just let them slide.
Fresnos look very similar, but are different peppers (or at least should be–that said, grocery stores don’t always label produce correctly.) I don’t see fresnos very often here in Chicago, but red jalapenos I see regularly (though, as I said before, its availability varies during the year, while green jalapenos are ubiquitous. There’s some sort of seasonality to it, but I haven’t figured it out.) Here the red jalapenos are labeled as “red jalapenos.” When they are available – at my grocery store, at least – there isn’t much of a difference in price. Usually around $0.99-$1.49/lb.
There are a number of chiles sold as “Hatch” chiles, and they vary in heat level from mild to quite toasty. Some of the stores here (during Hatch chile season, which is coming up) will simply label the peppers as “hot” and “medium,” but others will sell it by name. For example, the Sandia Hatch chile is a hot variety, while the popular Big Jim is medium, and the 1904 is mild… And then there’s the extra-hot Barker variety.
