Chilies: How Hot Do You Like 'Em?

There's plenty of diversity in fruit shapes, colors and sizes and the way the plants grow. And, of course, there's diversity in the heat among various types of chilies.

On the mild side of the scale is the bell pepper, which most people don't realize is a part of the chili pepper family. The hottest chili is the habanero (figure A).

What makes a pepper hot?

Here's a hint: It's not the seeds.

"The heat in a chili pepper is found along the cross walls (figure B)," says Paul Bosland, director of New Mexico's Chile Pepper Institute. And the heat of different peppers has been quantified using the Scoville heat unit, which measures how many units of dilution it would take to eliminate a chili's heat altogether.

A sampling of some of your favorite peppers:

orange habanero: 210,000
tabasco: 120,000
jalapeno M: 25,000
Long Slim cayenne: 23,000
pasilla: 5,500
serrano: 4,000
bell: 0

The heat of a chili pepper used to be to determined by taste, but today Rosland and his peers use high-performance liquid chromatography. It "tastes" the peppers and analyzes the components that produce heat.

Red savina (figure C), on the other hand, has a broad, lingering heat. In fact, Bosland compares chilies to fine wine: Each variety has its own distinct characteristics.

Plant breeders capitalize on the chiltepine's genetic makeup to develop disease-resistance and plant hardiness in new chili pepper varieties. Today, there are hundreds for gardeners to choose from.

Growing peppers

In mild climates the peppers can be grown as perennials, but most folks grow them as warm-season annuals. If you can grow tomatoes, odds are you can grown chili peppers. Be careful not to provide too much nitrogen. Otherwise, a big, lush plant will grow but with no fruit.

Peppers are especially vulnerable to powdery mildew. Be on the lookout for spotting on the leaves if you're concerned about mildew. One good deterrent against viruses is getting it right in the first place: Choose seeds or transplants that are best adapted to your zone.

Final thought: Too much fire isn't always a good thing. Rosland suggests you "look at chilies as salt. If you put too much salt in the dish, it ruins it. The same thing with chilies. If you make it too hot, you won't enjoy it. You're going to see that there are subtle flavors, subtle aromas coming out of the habanero and tabasco that's not in the other types of chilies, and so that's really what you're going for."