Last spring, I planted a few jalapeno pepper plants. Not sure of what variety, but the green ones are fairly mild. I let many of them ripen…and jsut sliced open a deep-red one-WOW! Like liquid fire!
Is that why all the jalapenos you buy (pickled in jars) are green?
I never heard of a red jalapeno. Are you sure they aren’t like habaneros? Habaneros are fiery-hot red peppers.
Jalapenos do ripen to red, but I’m reading differing accounts of whether or not as a rule they’re hotter. We’ve had many different levels of heat from peppers grown in our own garden, so determining heat isn’t an exact science.
ETA BTW, habaneros are orange, differently shaped, and an entirely different pepper from jalapenos.
My latest small hobby the past few years has been growing pepper of all sorts. And I like stuff HOT.
Oh yeah, you let em get red and soft and those babies can be hot hot hot. And the flavor (if you dilute em) is quite different. Green ones have that “green flavor” that something like green bell pepper have. Red is different.
I have 3 or 4 RED HABANEROS in my garden right now. Anybody want a bite or two? 
And the green ones taste different from the later picked ones that turn orange. I’ve never let em go so long as to get red.
I think you usually see em green because its as soon as you can pick em (time is money and all that) it takes much longer to get to red.
The reason canned jalapenos are green is two-fold: because they are milder in that state (for that particular cultivar), and because waiting until they turn red takes too freaking long to be profitable. They’ve developed a completely heatless jalapeno (oh, the horror!), so it depends on the cultivar and the genes behind it.
Moving to Cafe Society.
Which is hotter red or green. The eternal debate in New Mexico. Of course the New Mexicans are generally talking about different chiles.
The fresh jalapenos in the store usually have a few that are starting to turn red.
Boy I just realized this last night, startling coincidence. I grew a lot of peppers this year, all kinds. I’d been adding a couple of serranos to my stir fries and dishes because 2 seemed like just the right amount of heat, along with some green jalapenos, anaheims, bells, poblanos and whatever else I’ve got. But last night I added some jalapenos that had been on the plant a while and were that dull red color. Hoo boy that was some fiery hot Cuban garlic lime fish and peppers dish I made. It was good, but went right up to the edge of almost too hot.
Be warned… the seed catalogs describe them as “low/lower heat” jalapenos. Here I was thinking 2000 Scoville units or thereabouts, not 0 Scoville units when I grew them one year. They were exactly like small, jalapeno shaped bell peppers.
I’ve found the heat level to be more dependent on the temperature and sunlight level while the peppers are maturing. If you get them still green right before they turn red, they’re just as hot, without the sweet flavor that red ones have.
I’d never bother with heatless peppers of any sort. Mostly I grow serranos and habaneros.
Burn baby burn! 
My brother has a contract with a wholesaler who sells directly to a big commercial canned food company to grow jalapeños until ripened. The red jalapeños are used to make chipotles.
All jalapenos, AFAIK, will ripen to red. I honestly haven’t noticed a difference in heat between red and green jalapenos, but there is a definite difference in flavor, similar to the difference between a green bell pepper and red bell pepper flavor.
I buy red pickled jalapenos in jars all the time. I guess they are hotter, but mostly I just find them sweeter and more intense in flavour. Yum. I think the brand I get is ‘El Paso’
Try a Bhut Jolokia chili, that will most likely melt you though, so be carefull. Also, measering levels of heat is an exact science, it’s done with the Scoville scale. One more thing, because I can’t help myself, but chili are not peppers…they’re chili, commonly mislabeled as chili peppers or just peppers, when, in fact, they are chili, with no pepper in them (though I suppose you could put some pepper on a chili and then it would be a chili pepper :D)
Has anyone noticed that with grilled jalapenos, there is sometimes a flavor component that I can only describe as perfumey? I’ve noticed that the more perfume I taste with the first bite the hotter the pepper is.
I’ve always noticed a ton of variation in heat among jalapenos purchased fresh in the grocery store. Peppers that look identical to each other can be very different with regards to heat.
Scoville scale is not an exact science. It is an averaged out series of impressions. It’s also more more for entertainment than science.
The Scoville scale originated as a subjective measurement, but I’m pretty sure that nowadays, it’s just a directly proportional measure of the concentration of capsaicin.
And jalapeno peppers vary considerably in heat level, but I think it’s largely independent of how ripe they are. It could be that you just happened to get some red ones that were near the top of the scale.
That’s what I get for opening my mouth when I should have just googled it
Sorry and thanks for everyone who posted good infos. Ignorance fought re: red jalapenos.
Ah, that’s what the SSS (Scoville Secret Society) want you to believe, you are merely falling into their trap, soon they will release the ultimate chili and take over the world! There’s nothing you can do to stop us…ummm…I mean them!