I bought some jalapeno plants from costco - they are full grown in pots with cage support.

They are fruit bearing and I have harvested a bunch.

They are super hot. My mom is very happy with them. But if people don't know how hot they are they will ruin any prepared food. These are not the typical store variety and I would not use them in typical jalapeno dishes - they would not make good jalapeno poppers.

Does the heat of jalapeno vary if you sun ripen them?

I have a bunch of other peppers growing so I will have something else to compare it to.

Overall pretty impressed with the plants - $13 bucks for pot, plant and cage and getting one harvest every month.

Should be a hot summer

Mike

roasting them and removing the skin seems to mellow them a little (to me).. and the char that I get adds a little more flavor.... if youre cooking with them in a cooked dish or relish...... if i'm eating them raw, I remove the seeds and white tissue inside... if i'm stuffing them, with either cheese or meat, i'll seed them, remove the white tissue and parboil them for about 30 seconds, and quench in an ice bath...

quote:

Originally posted by jimatcat:
roasting them and removing the skin seems to mellow them a little (to me).. and the char that I get adds a little more flavor.... if youre cooking with them in a cooked dish or relish...... if i'm eating them raw, I remove the seeds and white tissue inside... if i'm stuffing them, with either cheese or meat, i'll seed them, remove the white tissue and parboil them for about 30 seconds, and quench in an ice bath...

These are really hot - only thing I can claim to be in the top 1 percent is eating spicy food. These are super spicy for me to eat raw. I wear gloves when I pluck em.

They are great to use as a base for spicy booking.

I have a boat load of other peppers growing - this will be a summer of peppers.

I will try roasting them. I like grilled jalapeños with steak.

Mike

quote:

Originally posted by jimatcat:
roasting them and removing the skin seems to mellow them a little (to me).. and the char that I get adds a little more flavor.... if youre cooking with them in a cooked dish or relish...... if i'm eating them raw, I remove the seeds and white tissue inside... if i'm stuffing them, with either cheese or meat, i'll seed them, remove the white tissue and parboil them for about 30 seconds, and quench in an ice bath...

+1 to all of this. Also, I've noticed that if they cook long and slow (say, as if you are making ABTs in the smoker), the heat tends to mellow out. If you can work some kind of dairy into your recipe (such as cream cheese as part of the ABT stuffing), it helps a LOT.

Letting them ripen on the vine to a red colour will sweeten them a bit and (in my opinion) really round out the flavor. Heat for heat's sake is, to me, ridiculous - but heat with a nice, full flavor is something to be cherished.

If you plant jalapenos close to bell peppers you will have all hot peppers. Cross pollination will mix all of your crop.

Aye - peppers (and squashes) are the sluts of any garden. Learned this the hard way!

Tomatoes, not so much, but there still is a slight chance....

For real?

But can we trust an Ole Miss Guy from Alabama? Sounds like cross pollination to me.

Thanks for the education!

How many harvest do you guys get out of Jalapenos in a season ?

I am on second this year.

Mike

Mike,

The amount of heat is dependent on the variety. Some jalapenos are hotter that others. Cross-pollinating with a hotter pepper could make them even hotter.

We use to grow a variety on the farm called Ole. They were not exceptionally hot but were big for jalapenos. We had a lot of Mexicans who would come and u-pick. The bigger peppers filled up the bushel baskets quicker.

Picking serranos was worse than green beans, it seemed like the baskets would never fill up!

Tom

amount of water also matters. In drought years, they are hotter.

There ain't a real jalapeno grown that is really hot.

quote:

Originally posted by Gatogordo:
There ain't a real jalapeno grown that is really hot.

I have to disagree. The potted plants I bought from Costco throw off some super hot jalapenos. If you don't seed them out they are basically inedible. I eat super spicy food and I cannot eat these raw. Also when i pluck em I have to wear gloves or else my figure burn.

My other pepper plants have been a disappointment but the jalapenos are great. On the 3/4 harvest of the year.

Mike

Then it ain't a jalapeno. Period.

But, let me add, if, by chance, you really have a jalapeno which is substantially hotter than, say, a serrano, then you need to carefully save thousands of seeds because you have a very rare plant which would be very desirable to many pepperheads.

Post a pic of some of the peppers.