The Hottest Pepper

Wondering about the hottest pepper?

In Central and South America, chile peppers were already in use for medical and culinary purposes when they were introduced to Europe sometime in the fifteenth century. But what made the hottest pepper?

The Spanish people called the plants pimento, for black pepper and probably because they are part of the nightshade family (tomatoes,tobacco)

The folklore around chiles is overwhelming. Don't eat the seeds. Drink milk and eat bread after you get a scorcher. Suck on candy or better yet, eat a spoonful of sugar. What's true and what's false? First, let's get a green chile anatomy lesson.

image cross section of green chile new Mexico Chile Company

The Stem

The stem might not seem like such a big deal, but when you're roasting thousands of pounds of green chile the stem can get in the way.

We ask the pickers to break the stem off the chile as they are picking because they get caught in the roaster. Our roasters are make with 3/4 -9 ga expanded metal and the opening is important to let the flame through. Unfortunately, the opening also provides a home for the chile stems to get caught and unless a chile is tumbled, it will incinerate in the roaster.

Capsicum Glands

This is where it all begins. The capsicum glands (Greek "to bite") produce the heat of the chile pepper. When cleaning a chile, you can decide how much heat you want by the amount of glands and veins you leave in. For a milder version, scrape all the glands, veins and placenta out of the flesh.

In the old days, our ancestors discovered many ways to use capsicum. Food was its primary use, but pain management was another. They discovered that their digestive systems were stimulated, sore throats were numbed and inhaling the smoke from burning chile peppers would cause inflammation of the tear ducts.

None of this sounds like any fun to me. Give me a good green sauce and I'll be happy.

The Skin

You can't really eat the skin of a chile pepper. If it is a green pepper you have to blister the skin using heat. Some people use an open flame, others steam the skin off and others place the chiles in the oven.

The preferred way to remove the skin is fire roasting chiles. Large drums rotating around propane burners are the common method. Note that if you steam the skin off, the flavor will not be the same.

Red chiles can also be fire roasted, but they are more difficult to remove because the flesh is thinner.

The end result is to get to the flesh. Once you get there, you will be rewarded with the gold!

The Flesh

My grandmother used to roast her chiles over an open flame and the scent of chile roasting filled the house with a flavor I'll never forget. In the late summer months, the New Mexico sky is filled with charred bits of skin floating above the cities. If you're lucky enough to be there during this time, you'll get to sample the chile directly from the roaster.

Beneath the charred skin is the flesh and this is the prize. Of course if you can't be there, we sell frozen green chile and you can purchase it in 5 pound lots.

The Placenta, Veins & Seeds

As the chile pepper matures, it becomes hotter. I discovered this the hard way on the road in my chile education. You can read about my journey as I entered Chile Pepper University. The hottest pepper will always be on my mind and close to my lips.

This story about the hottest pepper
will strike home if you love chile peppers. If you're like me, you want the hottest pepper available.

What I didn't know, but do now is that the heat changes the placenta to a golden color as the chile gets hotter. If your chile pepper is golden along the veins and placenta, Look Out. It's going to be screaming hot!

As I said, you can scrape this out if you want a milder chile, but I would recommend leaving at least some of it in.

The seeds themselves have zero heat. You may experience some hot sensation from seeds, but it is only a result of the proximity to the placenta and the veins.