If you wanted to pick out a single starting point for the produce revolution, there is no shortage of candidates: tomatoes, fresh herbs, baby lettuces. But what about peppers? Chile peppers, certainly, but bell peppers even more so. Thirty years ago bell peppers came in one color—green.
But then a funny thing happened: consumers were offered a choice. And they responded. Between 1960 and 1990 American per capita consumption of bell peppers quadrupled. According to the USDA, on any given day almost a quarter of Americans will eat a bell pepper or a dish containing bell peppers. That’s nearly double the percentage of those who will eat a French fry and almost the same percentage as those who will eat a tomato.
This increase happened with chile peppers as well, though on a smaller scale. And oddly enough, after an initial rush of growth, chile pepper production and consumption leveled off in the 1990s, while bell peppers just kept on growing.
How did this come about? Once again, credit that most unlikely of all agricultural powers, the Dutch, who figured a way to outsmart nature. All peppers start out green; it is only as they mature that they begin to show their true colors. Technically what happens is not unlike that which causes the turning of the leaves in New England. Green chlorophyll is a dominant pigment and tends to overshadow everything else. But as fruits begin to mature and develop sugar, that sweetness alters their chemical makeup. The chlorophyll starts to break apart, which allows the underlying colors to reveal themselves. This happens easily in nature, but it takes some doing in agriculture. Peppers are tender and prey to all sorts of bugs and viruses. It takes extraordinarily careful farming to grow peppers to full maturity out-of-doors without their suffering some sort of damage, even if it is just cosmetic. In Holland farmers were consistently able to grow their peppers to full maturity inside greenhouses, meaning that they could offer peppers in a rainbow of colors. Red came first, then yellow, then orange, purple and even something called chocolate (mostly marketing poetry; really more of a bruised green).
Those color changes are merely symptomatic of a deeper transformation: what had been a pretty one-dimensional “green” flavor becomes sweeter and more complex. To chemists it’s the breakdown of the one-note 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine. This is a particularly pesky chemical, detectable to humans in very small concentrations and a symptom denoting a flaw in both cheeses and wines. As peppers ripen, a variety of smells take this chemical’s place—some of which comes from those once-hidden pigments that have suddenly become visible. All peppers have these shades of flavor, but we usually recognize only two: hot and sweet.
Perhaps we would be wise to leave our description of peppers there. The wilds of pepper taxonomy are ventured into only by the very brave or very foolish. Peppers are among the most diverse plants, with twenty-two wild families and five domesticated ones. Walk into any Mexican market, and you’ll find three or four fresh green chiles and at least half a dozen dried red chiles. (Mature red chiles are almost always dried, both for preserving and because they’re usually ground into a powder.
Names change by region. The fresh green chile that one group has always called a pasilla is called a poblano by another group (who use the word “pasilla” to refer to a dried red chile). Ironically, almost all of the peppers we find in the United States—from the common green bell to the fiery jalapeño—are members of the same species: Capsicum annuum (the main exception being the incandescent habanero, or C. chinense).
Chile peppers have a wide range of tastes, from the sharp, grassy flavor of serranos to the rounder, sweeter flavor of jalapeños. Drying seems to exaggerate the flavor nuances, much as fermenting brings to the fore the subtleties in wine grapes. Some chiles taste frankly of fruit, some of chocolate, others of smoke (although the truly smoky peppers, chipotles, are ripe jalapenos that have been dried over a smoldering fire).
The one flavor all chiles share, of course, is heat. Pepper heat comes from a chemical called capsaicin, an irritant that causes an intense burning sensation when it touches nerves, whether those nerves are in your mouth, on your hands, in your eyes or anywhere else. That is why chile peppers taste so hot. It is also why pepper spray (essentially atomized capsaicin) is such an effective deterrent. When the active ingredient capsaicin is rubbed into your skin, it burns. But then, according to scientists, the receptors that are sensitive to capsaicin get overloaded and become numb.
Capsaicin is found in significant concentrations only in certain parts of the pepper—primarily the placental veins that attach the seeds to the wall of the fruit. Despite the common cook’s advice to remove the seeds to reduce the heat of a pepper, capsaicin is barely detectable there—although if you remove the seeds, you usually remove the veins as well.
Different peppers contain different concentrations of capsaicin, ranging from the extremely potent habanero (the hottest in common commercial production) to the bell pepper (which has all the fire of a cucumber). The presence of capsaicin, and to some extent its concentration, depends on a single recessive gene. But it’s not as simple as that. Chile pepper heat is devilishly complicated. Not only does it vary within a single variety, but it also varies within a single farm.
And it can even vary within a single plant. Two seemingly identical peppers picked from the same plant at the same time can contain different amounts of capsaicin. Predicting which pepper will be hot and which mild is a problem that has confounded chile farmers for centuries. The differences can be quite extreme. Little Japanese shishito peppers, for example, are mostly sweet and mild. But about one in every dozen will be hot enough to lift off the top of your head. Plant breeders are working on controlling heat, and they have achieved some success. In the 1990s breeders in Texas succeeded in producing a jalapeno with all the bite of a bell—a great boon to people who say they want salsa but really prefer ketchup.
WHERE THEY’RE GROWN: More than two thirds of the bell peppers grown in the United States come from just two states—California and Florida, with the former holding a slight edge. Peppers are also an important import. About 20 percent of the American supply comes from outside the country, mostly from Mexico. But a surprising number of peppers come from Canadian greenhouse growers, whose exotically colored specialty peppers have increased their American market share more than tenfold in the past fifteen years. When it comes to chile peppers, almost half of our fresh consumption comes from Mexico, whose exports to the United States have increased by 82 percent in the past decade, now totaling more than 425 million pounds.
HOW TO CHOOSE: Even though peppers of all colors are delivered to our markets year-round, from all over the world, you need to be careful when choosing them. Here’s how to pick a perfect pepper, spicy or not. First, pay attention to the color. Red peppers should be dark, almost brick-colored; the flavor of the lighter ones isn’t as deep. Look at the flesh carefully; it should be uniformly firm. Red peppers have to hang on the plants for a long time to get fully ripe. (They take as much as a month longer to grow than green bell peppers, hence the higher prices.) This extra hang time also allows plenty of opportunity for the kinds of nicks and dents that encourage spoilage. Try to pick out the boxiest peppers—the ones with the flattest sides. Those with graceful undulations look sensuous in Edward Weston photographs, but the skin in those little crevices and hollows will be hard to remove. Finally, hold the pepper in your hand. The best peppers—the freshest ones that still retain the most moisture—are those that are the heaviest for their size.
HOW TO STORE: Store peppers tightly wrapped in the refrigerator, but not in the coldest part. The best temperature for avoiding the water loss that is the most common problem for peppers is 45 degrees—almost exactly the temperature of most refrigerators. If kept colder than that, they can suffer breakdown due to excessive chill.
HOW TO PREPARE: Peppers can be sliced raw and mixed into salads or served with dips. But their flavor improves immeasurably with cooking.
ONE SIMPLE DISH: Stuff roasted and peeled bell peppers or mild poblano chiles with a spoonful of soft fresh goat cheese and snipped fresh chives.