Cookaholics Bulletin Board

I like hot food, and can stand things very hot. I also like serranos, but they can be quite difficult to get. Went to the farmers marker, and a local farmer (very local, just down the road) had them, and cheap! So, I bought them. Went to make salsa. One big tomato, charred, one small serrano, charred. Basically inedibly hot; you can eat it, but only in very very small quantities. A drizzle on a fajita. No good for use in quantities where the salsa would actually be visible.

One of the advantages of serranos is supposed to be that they are more consistent then Jalapeños (also, they taste better ). What likely went wrong here? Maybe ottawa conditions made the peppers that much hotter? Or have the few times I've been able to buy them, have I got super mild ones? My reading, and experience, should be that they are somewhat hotter then Jalapeños, but not overly hot; not scotch bonnet or ghost chili category at all, or even close.

My stores here (in a smallish city) always have serranos. The ones I've gotten are never very hot. Because I want heat in my salsas I have to add habaneros.

Paul,

That's normal, yes. But all peppers vary a bunch in capsiacin content, as much as 100X. For example, I just bought a bag of anaheims this weekend, and 3 of them were normal but the fourth was as hot as a jalopeno.

Dave could probably answer this better, but I think the variation has to do with soil conditions, weather, plant mutations, plant stress, age at harvest, and time to market. And maybe other things I don't know about.

For me, whenever I work with hot peppers, I buy extra and taste each one before putting them in the food.

Sounds more like a Thai bird pepper, some of which are short and blunt, like the serrano, rather than pointed, like most Thai peppers. Serranos are about 15-20k, while Thai birds can be well over 100k.

I have a bunch of Thai bird peppers at the moment, still green, not red. I needed four or six and I got 40 for $2 in a package at the local Asian market. So what can I do with the rest of them? They are too hot for me to chop in use in food, and I am already making vinegar with the four I wanted. (I like to take seasoned sushi vinegar and drop in some peppers and some garlic cloves for a couple of months. It is very tasty.)

Thanks,

--Lisa

Hot pepper jelly? It's very goon on a cracker with a schmer of cream cheese.

They also freeze well. I used my food saver to freeze mine.

I'm freezing my glut that I got off my plant.

I freeze a generous number of peppers, but mostly I dry the excess. Only so much room in my freezer!

Hmmm. Maybe the jelly. These guys are seriously hot and I am not sure we will be able to eat the jelly! I'll look into it. Thank you!