Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

dmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 336 posts

Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

#161

Post by dekhn »

bb88 wrote: post #121
anthomtb wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When using hot peppers I remove some of, or all, of the seeds and pith. You can greatly control the amount of heat this way since the seeds and pith have the most concentrated capsaicin. Maybe habanero is too potent for that strategy but it works well on jalapeno, serrano, and whatever they grow in Hatch, NM. (and it should be obvious but wear disposable gloves if you do this, unless you want the worst wank of your l…

I also remove the membrane on the flesh too. Capsaicin dissolves in alcohol, so I tend to wipe everything down with 70% IPA minimum with a paper towel before sending it into the dish washer.

Actual conversation I had last week with my daughter: "Dad, did you cook something spicy in the skillet" (I have a cast iron skillet and normally am the only person who uses it)

"Yes, I made a sauce from chilis that was much too spicy, and used the skillet to cook the sauce down".

"Well, can you let me know next time, because I just made very spicy bacon!"

I normally only wipe down my cast iron skillet rather than cleaning it, and I think the metal is porous (even after seasoned), because I could still get a hint of spice on my finger from touching the cast iron surface.

Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

#162

Post by sophacles »

tptacek wrote: post #11

The reason I took away from this: large agricultural producers of peppers bred towards a "low heat, low variance" standard, away from a "high variance" standard that produced frequent hot jalapenos. Low-heat-low-variance is better for mass food production, because producers can just dose the capsaicin directly, which is something they can't do easily when every pepper is a wildcard. There are second-order effects, li…

> Peppers are one of the easier and more forgiving things to grow yourself. Just grow your own or buy from a farmer's market.

There's only 5 species that make up the domesticated peppers. Most come from just 2: capsicum annuum (bell peppers, jalapenos, anaheims, and the vast majority of the rest) and capsicum chinense (scotch bonnet, habenero, ghost peppers, etc). [1]

Those 2 species will also cross-breed pretty well, and within a species there is of course no barrier for crossing. The best part of having a garden with a lot of pepper varieties is that next year's volunteers are going to be some fun mystery-cross, like cayanne looking pepper with no heat, or a super hot (but slightly mangled looking) hatch. Sometimes different seeds from a single pod may produce wildly different crosses - pollen from multiple plants may be on that bee!

So while you're absolutely correct that peppers are very forgiving[2] to grow yourself, amusingly that makes breeding your own jalapenos for next year a lot of extra effort. If you don't net them off from pollinators and hand pollinate, you will likely get unexpected results.

[1] https://peppergeek.com/capsicum-pepper-species/ has a nice overview for the curious.

[2] my family has a joke that peppers are not forgiving, they are masochists - that is they seem to do better when you kind of just ignore them (to the point of not even weeding near them), unlike other plants that do even better when you pamper them.

Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

#163

Post by coffeebeqn »

progmetaldev wrote: post #26
amenghra wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is most peppers pack the most heat in their seeds. Some peppers have a hot oil that can get on your fingers and start tingling minutes/couple hours later.

I thought the same, but it's supposed to be from the pith. I just think that since the seeds grow off the pith, you get some of that pith with the seeds. I've also felt the horror and pain of using the restroom hours after dealing with peppers, not realizing the mistake that I had made. Never again though, that was a teaching moment for life!

Smokin Ed Currie also says that the pith is where the spice is mainly (creator of Carolina Reaper for example)

Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

#164

Post by ambichook »

easterncalculus wrote: post #111

Same thing with mustard. Mustard used to be spicy, then "yellow mustard" came out, then yellow mustard became mustard, then actual mustard became "spicy mustard".

what you refer to as "yellow mustard" or just plain "mustard" australia at the very least labels as "american mustard", and then label the "spicy mustard" as "english mustard"

Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

#165

Post by sitzkrieg »

mkoubaa wrote: post #126
jseliger wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less spicy is actually good. I prefer more flavorful chiles, with less spice. Mark Miller's conversation with Tyler Cowen is good on this subject: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/mark-miller/ . Chiles are actually fruits and, combined judiciously, create a lot of complex flavors. Excess spiciness overwhelms the flavor. And people who want absurdly spicy peppers, can get them: ghost chiles, carolina reaper…

I've never smoked. If my first time was with the most expensive Cuban cigar, all I will feel is the smoke , I'll cough, and I won't enjoy it. When you build up tolerance for spice, you are in a position to enjoy the beautiful and little known flavors that hot chiles offer

this is the way. ideally building up your spice ferocity with real peppers. dont get me wrong i did my time w ridiculous extract sauces (even before hot ones craze, smile) but its just not the same

Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

#166

Post by sitzkrieg »

bobthepanda wrote: post #147
ethbr1 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just a little bit older than the US bacon craze, which was born out of unsold pork bellies, themselves a consequence of the late 1980s "Pork: the other white meat" campaign (itself a response to healthier, leaner chicken's rise). There's no way to produce a loin without a belly, etc. So ironically, the US turned to more UK-like pork cuts in the 1980s, and then advertising turned it back to full-fat pork belly bac…

i kind of wish i had experienced grocery shopping back when all the weird cuts were cheap. these days, if anything what I would've considered off cuts growing up (wings, oxtail) are now more expensive than other parts in my area. I saw oxtails for $20 a pound the other day.

agreed, i remember being able to get monster tri-tip cuts any store for a total steal

Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

#167

Post by r14c »

g8oz wrote: post #134

In general any sort of produce available in North America suffers from blandness. Try a tomato in Southern or Eastern Europe by way of comparison.

You definitely mean United States. the "cultural" parts of NA still have heritage varieties of tomato that taste great. same deal with corn, the US corn products are terrible and bland. though my understanding is that nixtamilized corn isn't very easy to access in europe, so y'all might not even know what i'm talking about!

Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

#168

Post by dunham »

bb88 wrote: post #107
PheonixPharts wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I enjoy plenty of non-spicy foods, and don't need every meal to be spicy, nor to I think that the only flavorful meals are spicy meals. My point is exclusively with chili peppers, as the spice increases so does the flavor. I didn't grow up eating spicy food, and my experience has been that as my spice tolerance has grown overtime I have found access to increasingly won…

That's interesting, I am curious if it's the capsaicin itself you're tasting directly. I know I've had hot sauces that were just heat without any kind of real flavor. It's not that I couldn't taste it. I could, I just didn't want any more of it.

It could be quite possible that for a given pepper, the variables that increase the capsaicin also increase the flavor compounds. It is possible to separate out the flavor, I remember reading about Grant Achatz experimenting with it, but you need a rotary evaporator to pull it off.

Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

#169

Post by dekhn »

ambichook wrote: post #156
delfinom wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brussel sprouts are a bad example. They are the bastard product of hundred of years of human fuckery to turn the same plant into kale, sprouts, broccoli and more.

holy crap TIL Brassica oleracea is a single species that covers like 8 different groups of vegetables, all of them with massive variety between them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea

It's almost like brassica has a little knob that has been turned differently in various european cultures.

The variety looks huge but often if you pay close attention, they're really just scaled/rotated variants on each other. Romanesco is the one that looks like an actual fractal.

Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

#170

Post by sitzkrieg »

faangguyindia wrote: post #160
tptacek wrote: post #11

The reason I took away from this: large agricultural producers of peppers bred towards a "low heat, low variance" standard, away from a "high variance" standard that produced frequent hot jalapenos. Low-heat-low-variance is better for mass food production, because producers can just dose the capsaicin directly, which is something they can't do easily when every pepper is a wildcard. There are second-order effects, li…

>Low-heat-low-variance is better for mass food production, because producers can just dose the capsaicin directly, which is something they can't do easily when every pepper is a wildcard. As if simple math can't be used to average out the dose.

considering the time, effort, tooling required to calculate this of your incoming thousands of kilos raw material...

ok so sample a smaller batch for averaging? that would probably work i agree. it must be more expensive though

Post reply on HN