31. Peppers and Chillis

I always have a chilli plant on the go somewhere, usually the red ones you can buy in the supermarkets. I use them for cooking and for spicing up my gin and tonic - Ophir gin with a chilli in it is delicious. This season I have been more ambitious than that and am trying different varieties of peppers as well.

My mother is a great fan of South African Peppadews, small tomato-sized pickled piquante Juanita peppers (Capsicum baccatum). She bought some seeds there on a recent visit so we have planted them in pots alongside the tomatoes and tomatillos. The plants are healthy, but haven’t produced a huge crop, not enough to be worth pickling anyway. Juanita peppers are one of the sweet peppers, and good to mix into salads .

The larger sweet bell pepper crop did well, but they have stayed green this year. They need a lot of sun and very warm weather to turn them into their brighter red or yellow sweeter versions, and we haven’t had enough of that this summer .

James Wong has an interesting section on chillis vs peppers in ‘Grow for Flavour’. They are both capsicums and botanically the same, but the key difference is the presence (or not) of the chemical capsaicin which is what provides the spice. Each chilli’s genes determine its spice level, and they can be ranked on something called the Scoville scale which measures how many times they would need to be diluted for their spiciness to become unnoticeable. The higher the number of units, the spicier the chilli is. Sweet peppers have a gene mutation that blocks the production of capsaicin, removing the spice.

While each variety’s spice level is genetically determined, there are some growing tricks you can use to turn the volume up. One is to let the plants dry out and start wilting between watering sessions which reduces the yield, but ups the spiciness quotient. Another is to water them with salt water from time to time which increases both the spiciness and the yield. Like the sweet peppers, chillis will need a lot of sun to change their colour from green to red.

I use the fresh chillis for cooking and for my gins so grow them indoors for a year round supply. But JW’s book also shows how to change the taste of chillis by smoking them eg. from jalapeno into chipotle, and how to dry them to store during the winter months. But you will need to get his book to look that up.