who has access to this machine, no matter how many chilies he tests, the habañero always tops the scale.
While the question of how hot a pepper might be is fun to discuss, a very hot chili pepper such as the habañero or ‘Tepin’ can actually burn you. Craig Dremann recommends that if you’re going to eat a chili pepper you’ve never had before, you should taste it very, very carefully. When he tries a new pepper, he bites into it very slightly with his teeth, and then gingerly tastes the top of his teeth to see what is happening. He then proceeds gradually to bite through the skin and then finally into the chili pepper itself. He avoids using his tongue and lips until he knows the pepper is sufficiently mild.
No matter which variety you choose, peppers hot or sweet enliven the meal and are beautiful in the garden. As gardeners, we have a fabulous choice of peppers, and the mightiest chef can only sigh and yearn for such a flavor-filled option. The following sections will make all your chili dreams possible.
A bountiful basket of the colorful pepper harvest.
[Scoville Units]
In 1912, Wilbur Scoville, a pharmacologist, developed a test to determine the capsaicin content of a hot pepper. He dissolved exact amounts of chili peppers in alcohol diluted with sugar water and had a panel of at least five tasters rate the heat. The hotness was recorded in multiples of one hundred Scoville units. While obviously subjective, this rating did give a rough idea of how hot a pepper variety might be. Today, we analyze peppers’ heat using more scientific methods, with a high-performance liquid chromatography machine. The machine-produced numbers are then converted to Scoville units.
The chart to the left gives approximate Scoville unit readings for some of the more popular peppers.
| SCOVILLE HEAT SCALE | |
| Pepper Variety | Scoville Units |
| Habañero types | 100,000-300,000+ |
| Chiltepíns | 50,000-100,000 |
| Thai | 70,000-80,000 |
| Cayenne, aji, tabasco | 30,000-50,000 |
| Serrano, hot cherry | 15,000-30,000 |
| Jalapeño, Fresno | 5,000-15,000 |
| Ancho, pasilla | 1,000-1,500 |
| ‘NuMex Big Jim,’ ‘Anaheim’ | 100-500 |
| Sweet bells, pimientos | 0 |
the Creasy pepper gardens
My 1990 pepper garden took over the entire front yard and was interplanted with flowers for drying and for beauty. Both were harvested at about the same time and the bouquets were hung from the garage rafters to dry. The peppers were enjoyed fresh of course, but the bulk was either given to a food bank, frozen, or dried in the dehydrator.
I have an unusual vegetable garden—it’s smack dab in my suburban front yard. Twenty-five years ago, I was forced to garden “around front.” Our backyard was hopelessly filled with large trees—a redwood, pines, and a fruitless mulberry—and between the shade and the root competition, a vegetable plant didn’t have a chance. In those days “veggiescaping” was considered verboten, and when I first planted vegetables around front, I felt forced to plant them surreptitiously in a narrow strip along the front lawn—hiding them among tall flowers. Fortunately, I was studying landscape design at the time, and it wasn’t long before it occurred to me that my frilly lettuces, ruby chards, most herbs, eggplants, and my pepper plants were every bit as beautiful as many so-called ornamentals and I could grow them in full view. Of course, planting them in long boring rows and covering the plants with old bleach-bottle cloches wouldn’t cut it in the front yard, but well-grown vegetables planted in decorative patterns, or interspersed with flowers, I knew would be lovely.
It was in this same time frame that I was developing my concept of edible landscaping, which was later to become a book; thus my front flower border became part of my many design experiments. For a few years, I experimented with background borders of artichokes, chard, tall chili pepper varieties, and beans; middle borders of sweet peppers, eggplants, carrots, and bush peas; and front borders of parsley, strawberries, lettuces, and small ornamental peppers. As the years progressed, I found I needed more and more space for vegetables; the long narrow beds weren’t big enough and they limited my designs. So, every year the beds got larger and were reconfigured and the lawn got smaller. Finally, about fifteen years ago, the genie was completely out of the bottle, the remaining lawn came out, and I appropriated the entire front yard to grow vegetables and herbs to research varieties for my book Cooking from the Garden. That year, I trialed 110 varieties of vegetables in the front yard, and both my husband and the neighbors thought the garden quite wondrous. Once convinced I could make a vegetable garden a social success, I have since grown over thirty different theme vegetable and herb gardens in our front yard. (Since I garden in USDA Zone 9, that includes both winter and summer plantings.) One season, I planted a Native American garden, yet another year I chose a salad theme, and so on.
The 1990 Pepper Garden
In the summer of 1990, I decided that while over the years I had planted many pepper varieties, it was time to explore peppers in depth, and I planned a pepper garden in the beds near the driveway where they would get lots of heat. To intersperse color among the pepper plants, I selected many different types of flowers that dry well for bouquets.
In January, I ordered seeds of twenty varieties of peppers, six special dry flowers, and some choice cutting flower varieties, all by mail. Pepper plants take a long time to get sizable enough to plant outside, so I started them in mid-February, about ten weeks before I planned to plant them outside—namely, in early May. This is at least a month earlier than I start my tomatoes and most of my other vegetables and flowers. I started most of the pepper seeds in potting soil in flats, others in quart containers. I planned for a plant each of most of the bells and hot chilies and a half dozen ‘Anaheims’ and two pimientos so I would have enough peppers to roast. To get the seeds to germinate quickly, I placed them in the oven of my gas stove, which has a pilot light that maintains a temperature of about 80°F when I leave the door ajar. In reading the germination information on the seed packages of both ‘Tepin’ and ‘Chili D’Arbol,’ I noted that instead of sprouting in the usual seven to ten days, they can take from fourteen to twenty-one days; therefore I planted them in their own container.
As soon as the pepper seedlings emerged, the containers were moved onto my kitchen table and under florescent lights. (Two varieties failed to germinate. I assume, because eighteen varieties germinated easily, that the seeds of the ones that didn’t were either too old or hadn’t been handled properly by the grower or seed company.) After the seedlings produced their first set of true leaves (the leaves that appear after the first seed leaves), I moved each plant into its own four-inch-square container and fertilized them with quarter-strength fish emulsion. (You’re right, the kitchen smelled awful for a day.) A month or so later, I moved them up into one-gallon containers and repeated the fertilizer. By mid-April, the plants were ready to go outside, and I lined the containers up along an east-facing garage wall to get them acclimatized to the sun and nighttime temperatures. I also found a few pepper plants at the nursery that I wanted to try, and added them to my collection, which now numbered twenty-one.
In early May, my crew and I planted out the peppers. After six years as a vegetable garden—one that had been mulched and babied every year—the soil they were to be grown in was already in great shape, filled with organic matter, and the beds and paths were in place. The peppers were to be planted in three long rows separated by existing brick paths. Flowers—namely, different colors of statice and gomphrenas and tall
