My husband and I planted several types of hot peppers this year, including “red hot cherry peppers”, which I’ve never encountered before. The plant is doing really well, it’s big enough that we had to put a tomato cage around it because it needed something to lean on. The little info card that came with the sprout said that the peppers will mature from green to red, but none of mine have. They just get to a certain size and stop growing, staying green. I picked them, thinking that maybe they continue to ripen off the plant, but so far no luck.
Has anyone here grown these peppers before? Should I leave them on the plant after they get to full size and just wait for them to turn red? Can I eat the ones that I already picked while they’re green, or would that be a bad gastronomical decision?
Most peppers are okay to eat green. However, for some reason, the hot ones tend to be significantly hotter when they are green than after they turn red, so be careful.
Yeah. I discovered it when I started to cook Thai food. You can try the experiment if you have a grocery that sells green and red peppers of the same type–jalapenos for example. Red ones are riper and some of the hotness goes to sugar, I think. They also tend to be softer in texture.
I’m wondering whether they seem less hot to you because the sugars in them mask the heat for you? My experience last summer with our serranos was definitely that the red ones were almost excruciatingly hot, whereas the green ones I could nibble a little bit of them raw.
I threw them in my fideos last night, and could barely taste them. I’m going to let them ripen to red from now on so I don’t miss out on any firey goodness! My green jalapenos were disappointingly mild as well.
Growing conditions affect the “hotness” of chiles. Cool, wet weather & too much fertilizer aren’t recommended. The plants might be happy, but hotness might disappoint. Good info here.
Variety also matters. Some types of jalapeno are bred for minimal heat to please those with timid palates. (Or tender digestive systems.)
I grew some cherry peppers a few years ago and got impatient and tried them green. The first bite I took tasted like a green pepper. The second, bigger bite I took burned. It was like there was capsacin in some of the pepper and not in other parts. Once they were ripe red, they were brutally hot. Your husband has something to look forward to when they ripen.
I read an analysis of peppers in Cooks Illustrated a couple years ago. Apparently, the outer flesh has the least heat (capsaicin), the seeds have more–and, contrary to popular belief, the most heat is in the white pith around the seeds, not in the seeds themselves. If your first bite was just of the flesh, that might explain why it wasn’t hot. (I’ve nibbled a little bit of an habanero, but based on a scary-ass thread I read here years ago, I’ve never dared to eat beyond the very outermost layer of flesh).
