Vegetable Gardening (26 page)

‘Cubanelle':
These 6-inch-long, light green, open-pollinated fruits have thin walls and blunt ends, making them perfect for frying. They mature in 65 days.

‘Giant Marconi':
This AAS-winning variety, which stretches to 8 inches long, is known as one of the largest Italian frying peppers available. It matures early at 63 days and is high yielding and flavorful. It's the perfect grilling sweet pepper. These hybrid plants are also disease resistant.

‘Gypsy':
These AAS-winners produce 4-inch-long, wedge-shaped fruits early in the season; the fruits mature from yellow to orange-red in 60 days. This hybrid variety is very productive and adapts to many growing conditions.

‘Jimmy Nardello':
Okay, so I couldn't resist a pepper close to being my namesake. This tasty variety features very sweet, 8-inch-long, open-pollinated peppers that mature to red in 90 days. Long, thin, and sweet — just like me!

‘Paprika Supreme':
Care to make your own paprika powder? Well, here's the pepper for you. These 7-inch-long, flattened, thin-walled hybrid fruits are perfect for drying after they mature; maturation takes 100 days.

‘Peperoncini':
These 4-inch-long, wrinkled, open-pollinated peppers are best known as the pickled, light green peppers served in Italian antipasto. They take 62 days to mature.

‘Sweet Banana':
Probably the most well-known of the long, tapered, open-pollinated sweet peppers, these 6-inch-long fruits, which mature from yellow to red, are born on compact 1
1/2-foot-tall plants. They take 72 days to mature. ‘Banana Supreme' is a hybrid version.

‘Sweet Red Cherry':
These thick-walled, 1
1/2-inch-round sweet open-pollinated peppers are often available at salad bars and pickled. The plants are compact — 1
1/2 feet tall — and are very productive. They mature in 78 days.

Peppers that turn on the heat

At one time, the only hot peppers you'd see people eating were the dried flakes sprinkled on pasta in Italian restaurants. How times have changed! With the growing interest in cuisine from around the world — such as Mexican, Korean, Thai, and Indian — hot peppers are enjoying widespread popularity.

Speaking generally about hot peppers is difficult, because the flavor and level of hotness varies with each type of pepper. But, here's one general fact to keep in mind: Hot pepper plants usually are easier to grow and produce more peppers than sweet pepper plants. And because some varieties are so hot that they could strip paint, you won't need to add very many to your cuisine. In the following sections, I discuss the factors behind the fire, provide a chart for measuring a pepper's heat, and list some popular varieties.

Understanding the fire of the hot pepper

Before getting into hot peppers, you need to understand the heat in hot peppers.The active ingredient that causes all the fire is called
capsaicin
(the tiny, blisterlike sacs on the inner wall of the fruit, as shown in Figure 5-1), which is located on the pepper's
placental wall.
You find fewer sacs at the tips of hot peppers, so you could bite off the tip of a hot pepper and be fooled into thinking it's not that hot. If you cut into the pepper or handle it roughly, however, you break the inner-wall lining, releasing capsaicin throughout the fruit — even to the tip.

To counteract the hotness of hot peppers, try eating dairy products such as yogurt, ice cream, or milk with your hot dishes.

Some pepper varieties, such a habañero, are so hot that you can get serious burns in your mouth. If you get the capsaicin in your eyes or in a wound, you can get burns there also. Check out the new, less hot habañero in the later section "Picking some hot peppers to grow."