Just last night, I ate some red jalapeños that I could barely taste at all. Not just not spicy - free of flavour.
Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)
281–290 of 336 posts
Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
The preparation concept is huge. Growing up way back in the day, industrial canned spinach was absolutely disgusting and pushed on all forms of school cafeterias. They even tried to influence its liking with a cartoon character. Many many years later, fresh spinach was made available and I find it delicious. How anyone thought that mushy slop from a can was ever considered edible is beyond me.
>They even tried to influence its liking with a cartoon character. Popeye? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye
It's still a brand carried in many US stores too.
Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)
#283The 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…
As someone who does small scale food production (not with jalapeños) I appreciate it. The big salsa producers surely just have someone running a mass spec on site. Consistency is a lot harder for smaller producers who don’t have the budget for expensive machines/scientists and ready access to capsicum. (I actually do buy that in liquid form for one product, but not an oleo-resin, something water-soluble.)
In cooking for myself, I still appreciate it. I like heat more than nearly anyone, to the point where it’s borderline pathological, but I also like pepper flavor, and now I get to use more of it! When I come across a batch of less hot habaneros I buy all I can, they have a wonderful flavor and I’d like to use more of them.
Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)
#284Here are the key points about why jalapeño peppers are less spicy than ever:
1. Jalapeño peppers are deliberately being bred to be bigger, shinier, prettier - but less spicy and less flavorful. This is driven by demand from the processed food industry for consistency.
2. About 60% of jalapeños go to processing plants for things like canned peppers, salsas, sauces, etc. These companies want predictable, mild heat levels so they can accurately label products as "mild," "medium," "hot."
3. In the last 20 years, a very popular jalapeño variety called TAM II has taken over much of the market. It was specifically bred to be huge, shiny, and very mild - less than 10% as spicy as traditional jalapeños.
4. The invention and popularity of TAM jalapeños is making the overall jalapeño gene pool larger but milder. Hotter, more flavorful varieties are losing ground.
5. There are still hotter jalapeño varieties like Mitla and Early jalapeños, but many restaurants and home cooks don't know to ask for specific pepper breeds.
6. Some experts draw comparisons to the tomato industry - mass-produced tomatoes lost flavor, but heirlooms are bringing it back. Perhaps hotter heirloom pepper varieties could also regain popularity.
Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Not the case in Europe at all. Any $RANDOM woman here over 40/50 cooks far better than any one in the US. My mother has a huge amount of recipes inside her head. Also, homemade food in Europe (especially the Southern) has a much better quality than any industry-processed food.
I don't know how your statement disagrees with mine? You are basically agreeing with me. A "random woman" in Europe who cooks well is not random at all, because we live in different times and people cook because they like it or are good at it. There are very few people who are bad cooks anymore, because those who are bad at cooking simply do not cook at all, especially not for other people.
In the past you'd have a lot of bad cooks, because most women had to cook, wether they were good at it or liked it or not.
I'm prepared to believe that in Southern Europe, family cooking traditions have been kept alive and healthy, resulting in high quality cooking. In Northern Europe and the US I don't know what the hell was going on in the 20th century.
Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)
#286Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you never grown peppers? It really is absurdly easy. The point though really isn't that everyone's just going to grow their own peppers; rather, it's that it's very easy to introduce an alternate supply of highly-variable jalapenos, because there aren't many barriers to producing them. There are urban garden companies in Chicago that produce lettuce right now and could probably produce jalapenos if anybody reall…
Yeah, I've seen boston-area college students successfully grow szechuan peppers on a south facing (outdoor but sheltered) balcony - with exactly as much neglect as you'd expect from undergrads in a shared apartment. "Absurdly easy" is not an exaggeration.
Sichuan peppers are the fruits of a citrus tree, also known as prickly ash, not peppers at all. Also not ash, but also not something you'd grow on your balcony because they're covered in nasty thorns and second only to blackberries (brambles) in scratch-your-eyes-outness.
Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
My mom bought Green Giant broccoli and cauliflower in a gluey pseudo-cheese sauce. It was as disgusting as it sounds. I didn't like broccoli and cauliflower until I had them raw. Of course, YMMV :)
Cauliflower is probably the most versatile vegetable there is. Apart from boiling, there's no bad way to treat it. Even boiling works in soup!
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Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a saying, The bitter the better Many bitter foods are highly nutritious. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/bitter-foods
Bitterness is quite literally the "this is poison, stop eating" taste category that incidentally happens to have a lot of false positives because for the most part it's cheaper to reject some good food than to accept eating some poison. An ironic thing to say in a thread about peppers, but still.
And much much more false negatives, which raises the question if the "stop eating this, this is bitter and bitter means poisonous" has any truth in it.
Re: Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I cook because going to a restaurant is prohibitively expensive to do every day. Raw ingredients in Norway are already expensive. Most folks cook because they have few decent choices and like the past, they take shortcuts when they can. At one time, yes, women did most cooking, to a point and dependent on where one lived. Kitchens were dangerous for not only you, but your neighbor too - if you lived in a city. Which…
If the OP was eating horribly tasting brussel sprouts as a child, it is fair to say that one of the parents were doing the cooking and that they probably were lousy cooks. I don't think anybody would go out to purchase boiled brussel sprouts in the streets to feed their kids. But I might be wrong.
> At one time, yes, women did most cooking
In all of history until very recently. Still in most of the world. Especially in rural areas.
> I cook because going to a restaurant is prohibitively expensive to do every day.
Norway is notorious for this, yes. But still, just because you make food at home doesn't mean that you cook. (Not meaning you personally) People can make sandwiches, as you might know. I had several Norwegian friends who were sustaining themselves on sandwiches exclusively. An impressive feat, considering that bread in Norwegian supermarkets is probably the lowest quality bread in the world.
There's also a generation of old men who are lost between the old and the new world. Many of them being without a woman to cook and too stubborn to learn any cooking of their own, while at the same time not accepting to pay for their food in a restaurant or eatery, because that's "too fancy" and "too expensive", they instead sustain on canned fish and sandwiches made with the worst industrial processed ingredients they can find in a supermarket.