- cross-posted to:
- food
- cooking@mander.xyz
Just the most relevant bits:
According to The Mexican Chile Pepper Cookbook by Dave DeWitt and José Marmolejo, 60 percent of jalapeños are sent to processing plants, 20 percent are smoke-dried into chipotles, and just 20 percent are sold fresh. Since big processors are the peppers’ main consumers, big processors get more sway over what the peppers taste like.
The salsa industry, Walker said, starts with a mild crop of peppers, then simply adds the heat extract necessary to reach medium and hot levels. She would know; she started her career working for a processed-food conglomerate.
“I’ve worked in peppers in my entire life,” she told me. “Jalapeños were originally prized as being a hot pepper grown in the field. When we were making hot sauce in my previous job, we had the same problem, that you couldn’t predict the heat. When you’re doing a huge run of salsa for shipment, and you want a hot label, medium label, mild label, it’s really important to predict what kind of heat you’ll get. We tried a statistical design from the fields, and it just didn’t work, because mother nature throws stressful events at you or, sometimes, does not bring stress.”
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Side note: The article kinda bizarrely decides the best article to quote on the original strain of these jalapenos was a faith healing newspaper?
The "Christian Science" part of the "Christian Science Monitor" is literally a self-help faith healing movement that tells people they cant go to the doctor for anything except morphine and dentistry, and they only condone those two cause the founder had tooth problems and a morphine habit so she wrote those in as loopholes.
yeah they don't really have a strong religious opinion on peppers tho so i think its fine
The founder had tooth problems and a morphine habit so she wrote those in as loopholes.
Haha. I had no idea.
I will confess to recently having watched a video going through their whole history so it jumped out to me in particular, cause they are responsible for some pretty horrific deaths of children.
I swear to God half of thr jalapenos I've goyyen at the supermarket are just slightly angry brll peppers.
Vietnamese restaurants, on the other hand, always seem to get the good ones.
Anaheim peppers are good too if you want something the size of a jalapeño that still has some punch
So tasty too, not spicy enough for my preferences but the flavor is god tier.
Hot sauces are proletarian and the hotter they are the more good they are don't @ me I'm right
Reddit leftcoms literally hate Mao because "metaphysics." The absolute state of them
I dunno about metaphysics but I do know Mao ate the good shit.
Fun fact: Sichuan only became famous for peppers because the Qing dynasty's ruinous salt tax. "Fuck you, pay us or your food tastes bland and flavorless." So they went for chiles so they'd have some kind of flavor. Even if it hurt.
I have this theory that the really huge jalapenos in grocery stores must be crossed with bell peppers or something because they're always weak as hell. The best peppers are the ones grown at home, even if you gotta get an LED growlight to do it
I always get my ass handed to me by the Jalapeno slices in Pho, yet most store bought ones are just water flavored. This makes sense.
The question arises, where do the Pho places source their peppers?
Look for the ones with a little streak of orange color. The store ones are usually not ripe enough.
I grew my own jalapenos from seed last year and they were ridiculously mild, but I just attributed that to either poor weather or insufficient fertilization.
In my experience the heat that pepper plants experience correlates to how hot the fruit end up being- the spiciest ones I've ever grown were in black cloth pots sitting on concrete while ones I grow in the ground have been much weaker.
To get really hot peppers you need to stress the plant. It drops the yield but ups the heat alot. I experiment with my peppers every year growing them in different pots so I can care for them differently. Rich soil will decrease the heat so plant them in something sandier with out compost and only fertilize when the plant is still growing but before it puts on fruit. Pruning off the fruit can also help the other peppers increase in spiciness. You can get super scientific about growing the perfect pepper but those are just the easy things I do.
