Chandra, Do you think it is because they are getting more water? I cleaned and chopped hot peppers for half an hour without gloves last week. When I was making salsa I had to leave the membrane and seeds to get enough heat. It was just weird. On the other hand, a friend who gardens 10-12 miles from me said "my peppers are so hot this year they make my false teeth hurt". LOL That made me wonder if it was just the difference in growing conditions. I'll be interested to hear what Jay and Dawn have to say.

I know almost nothing about peppers, but I have noticed that my Jalapeno are sweet and mild. I did not start my bells and Jalapenos, I thought I must have picked up the wrong ones at Atwoods.

Larry

Chandra your experience puzzles me some. How much were you watering them. Many say the air temp and the amount of water affects the heat. Personally I feel the amount of water is the biggest influence. Mine have normal to above normal heat this year. My deep fast draining sandy loam soil helps in that regard. I haven't ate a lot of mine yet but so far haven't noticed any noticeably milder than normal. Many in NM feel that the hot dry climate attributes to the flavor and heat levels of the chiles grown there. I do feel you can over water them. And the chiles will survive on less water than many other crops. I will be interested to learn how you water them during the heat as compared to the cooler temps. I can tell you some on mine will leave the skin on your hands tingling if cut up a few with bare hands. I have found a couple of new ones that I like this year. Jay

Chandra, I was making salsa everyday for awhile and my recipe calls for 6 jalapeno peppers with the seeds and membranes removed, and I find that it is spicy but certainly not hot. We usually make it that way because some who eat with us don't like it hot. This year it wasn't as hot as usually so I decided to use the same 6 peppers but leave the seeds and membrane in 3 of them. After I tasted it, I labeled it "Hot Spicy Salsa" because it had plenty of heat. Most of my peppers were like yours though and the wall of the pepper had very little heat, but it was plenty hot inside.

I bought a bottle at Walmart like the ones I use in my kitchen for vegetable oil and olive oil, but I think they are probably made for booze, with the little metal spout at the top. I filled it with red chili peppers with about a half inch of stem attached and slit about the bottom 3/4 inch of each pepper. Then I added a few small red and green jalapeno peppers to finish it, but I cut those in half and took out the seeds. I pushed them all down the small neck of the bottle and heated vinegar almost to boiling and poured over the peppers. It looks beautiful, and in just a few days the vinegar had plenty of heat. We like it to sprinkle on cooked greens and such. The seeds are still in the peppers so it has plenty of heat.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pepper Sauce

I feel like the amount of water, the soil fertility and the warm temperatures all play a role in the amount of hot, pungent flavor that hot peppers develop. However, I grow mostly jalapenos and not many true Anaheim-type chiles so what I am writing from first-hand experience is related more to jalapeno peppers. I find it is true of habaneros as well.

In my garden, for the hottest flavor, I plant peppers into well-prepared, rich and fertile soil, but I never fertilize them after that unless they show symptoms of nutritional deficiency, which they almost never do. I think overfeeding with fertilizer somehow hurts their flavor and makes it less hot.

I water the peppers adequately in spring before they are setting peppers. After they bloom and set peppers I gradually cut back on their moisture and grow them as dry as possible. Too much water seems to have an adverse flavor on their heat. I let the plants get almost (but not quite) to the wilt point before I water, and then I don't water heavily. I do not deliberately let them wilt, but both last summer and this summer at very high temperatures (roughly 108-112) they would wilt before I realized it. And, yes, my hot peppers have been super-hot this year as they were last year.

The jalapenos I harvest in July and August are definitely hotter in flavor than those harvested in June. Then, as we go deeper into fall, the peppers are a little milder as the temperatures cool down.

With most hot peppers the majority of the heat is in the white membrane and the seeds get some of the flavor from the membrane. I use that knowledge when cooking or canning with peppers to control, to some extent, the degree of pungency in whatever I am canning or cooking.

This summer, my jalapenos and habs have been so hot that I have to wear 2 pairs of medical-type latex or nitrile gloves when handling the hot peppers. With the habs, if I am working with them for any amount of time, I have to change the gloves every few minutes because the capsaicin seems to find its way through the two layers of gloves and onto my skin. I am a big pepper wimp and don't like the burning sensation on my skin, so if I am cutting up more than one single jalapeno, I always wear gloves.

Carol, My dad always made pepper sauce that way. It is funnier that the older I get, the more I find myself doing things the same way he did them.

The issue of peppers not being as hot as expected was discussed on the Hot Pepper Forum a couple of weeks ago, and much of what the pepper experts there said was similar to what Jay and I have observed with regard to the environmental influences on pepper flavor. I'm going to find that thread and link it below.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Pepper Thread from Hot Pepper Forum

Here's a tidbit from Mexico. One of our favorite hot peppers is called Rayado. It's a kind of Jalepeño, only noted for having many tiny cracks in its skin and a tendency toward being hotter. Rayados are traditionally smoked and dried. They are primarily grown in a little corner of three stateds: Puebla, Veracruz and San Luis Potosi, in a region known as "El Huesteco." (Pronounced "Wess-take-oh"). It is generally recognized that the best Rayados are grown in this area and that factors contributing to their superiority are the moisture levels (wet and cool early in the year, followed by hot and dry.) But interestingly, hot days and cool nights are considered the absolute optimum for developing the best heat and flavor. So, peppers grown on an East facing slope of a hill (mountain by Oklahoma standards) generally have more heat and better flavor, than those grown on a West facing slope.

Vendors pay more for the Rayados grown in prime locations, than for others. Then, for retail sale, they mix them together and charge the higher price, as if they were all the best quality.

We knew someone who grew up in the Huesteco area, and could tell those peppers apart by their physical appearance. He would go through the market and pick out the best quality peppers, before having them weighed for sale! This did not make him popular with the vendors.

So, I suspect that our peppers will develop more heat as nights cool. Oklahoma is actually a pretty good place for fluctuation of day and night time temperatures.

George
Tahlequah, OK

Dawn, That is why I made the pepper sauce because Al and I were talking about how both our Dads always wanted that on the table. What my Dad ate came from the grocery store and was in a small shaker bottle. I bought a bottle the other day just 'for old time sake' and it was made with small yellow peppers. I hadn't seen pepper sauce in years, but I am sure it was only because I hadn't looked for it. When I was a child I didn't like spinach and turnip greens but was expected to eat them. I remember putting pepper sauce on them and taking really big bites so I could finish them in a hurry. LOL At our house a bottle of pepper sauce was always on the kitchen table just like salt and pepper.

Thank you all. I can clearly make out from your experienced observations that heat should make chillies even hotter.
But I don't know why that is not the case with our chillies.

This morning I observed carefully, here is what might be- sunchokes are growing east-side of the Chilli beds which block early morning sun and there is 4ft trellies fully covered with many types of gourds on west-side block evening sun and another 8x8 bed with beans/toms/cucmber treelies on north side... all these cover leads to reduced sunlight on chilli peppers. That could be one main culprit. Another would be, chilli beds has been heavily mulched with compst, then cardboard in the beginning and addedd 6-8" of lawn clippings, shredded corn stocks and other vegetable trimmings. Thirdly it has been irrigated with soaker hoseto get about an inch water per week.

I guess because all these three regions, our chillies might have turned mild. I yet to wait for few more weeks to see trend changes. I will update on this down the lines... -Chandra

I was reading the cooking forum last night and Annie mentioned that her peppers weren't hot this year. I had always thought that it was dry heat that made them hot, but maybe it is fluctuation in temps. It the garden mystery of 2012. LOL

Based on what George said about the Rayado peppers, and on the fact that Jay has pointed out how New Mexico (hot days, cool nights!) is prime growing for peppers, I am inclined to agree with Carol that maybe the temperature fluctuations play a role in pepper heat. My peppers are situated with a big pecan tree to their north, so they are in the shade by roughly 3:30 p.m. in the summer, which I had hoped would help with the wilting, but on some of the hot summer days this year, they would be wilted by noon. Of course, by noon it was often 100 degrees already on our worst days. Being shaded didn't appear to hurt their flavor, but they had full sun from the time the sun rose, so they had plenty of sunlight until 3:30 p.m.---really a whole day's worth of sun by then.

Chandra, Are you harvesting them while they are green or letting them turn red? With most hot peppers, there is a distinct flavor change as they turn red (or purple, orange or yellow---whatever their mature color is). With the peppers I grow that turn from green when less mature to red as they mature, I won't say they are any less hot for sure when they are red but I think they get sweeter once they're red, and that sweetness makes them seem less hot to me when I eat them.

Carol, We had three things that always sat on the kitchen table every day of the year: a salt shaker, a pepper shaker and a bottle of pepper sauce. We put it on everything, but especially on greens like collards, spinach and turnip greens, and in bowls of beans or in chili or soup for extra flavor. I probably was in college before I realized that everyone else did not necessarily have pepper sauce on their tables. Even family-style restaurants had pepper sauce on the tables in the 1960s and 1970s when I was a kid, and so did many of the "fine" steakhouses in Texas, as well as the not-so-fine ones too. : )

When we talk about the peppers pungency or lack of such, we have to remember that for most of us, our primary experience is with typical Oklahoma weather. The last two years have been both hotter and drier than usual, so we may be learning some new things as we go along, including the effect of this kind of weather on the flavor of the peppers.

Dawn

Carol, Yes lot of garden mystery in 2012, few yet to surface. Gardeners seems to you have great sense of humor, I found them each and every post LOL!

Dawn,
We harvest at all levels, very tender/young chillies as site bites with meals, green chillies for many things and over matured red chillies for making salsa, chilly pastes etc.
I forgot to write something, my mom believes that "chillies usually less pungent in the beginning or when plant is younger and they will get hotter as plat get older" She tells me that they buy more lbs when new chillies season begins as they are less spicy and need to use twice number for cooking but just buy half of them at the end of the season where they re more hot.

Chandra, Does your home in India have cool nights or is it continuously hot during the growing season?

I had always thought that the hot peppers came when the weather was at it's hottest, but if that was the case we would be running with our mouths on fire after this summer.

Chandra, Tell your Mom that when she returns home she will still have to answer our GardenWeb questions. Once your in, your in, and there is no getting out of it. LOL

Carol,

Our home in India falls near tropical belt with arid climate with hot days and cool nights. Days peak temp will be around noon (not at 6pm like here) and temp keep dropping towards dusk and very pleasant by 7pm. I am sure she will and as she is already in. ahaha

PS: I sent you an email on another subject (cabins/vrbo near NEOK/AR).

-Chandra

Here is picture explains location of the chillies bed;