AMONG THE MANY GIFTS of the New World to the Old, fiery chile peppers may be the most valuable. On Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic, the natives he encountered offered him tiny, red, wild berries that looked to him like the red peppercorns grown in India and had a similar pungent spiciness. That led him to believe he’d found India. And so Native Americans became Indians, and those small red berries became peppers.
The small wild berries (Capsicum annuum variety aviculare), now called pequins or chiltepins, weren’t the only chiles growing in the Americas at the time, though. Native Americans in South and Middle America had been cultivating chiles for 7,000 years. Despite their vast differences in size, shape, pungency, and flavor, most of the world’s cultivated chiles today are Capsicum annuum. The most familiar exceptions are the tabasco pepper (Capsicum frutescens) and the habanero (Capsicum chinense).
Within a few years of Columbus’s first voyage, chiles were being planted in Europe and North Africa, and it wasn’t long before they were planted around the world. They slipped easily and quickly into cuisines as diverse as Spanish, African, Southeast Asian, Indian, and Chinese. Everywhere they went, they had a profound effect on the dishes they entered, enlivening them, turning bland to grand, and providing an abundance of good flavor.
The substance that makes chiles so spicy hot is called capsaicin. The heat is measured in Scoville units. While a typical jalapeño measures about 2,000 Scoville units of pungency, a habanero—one of the hottest peppers in the world, if not the hottest—measures 200,000 to 300,000. Some argue that pungency ought to join sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (the so-called “yummy” taste) as one of the basic tastes, but I think pungency is more a sensation than a flavor.
Capsaicin is produced in glands on the placenta of the fruits—the whitish substance in the interior of the pod to which the seeds are attached. Seeds do not produce pungency, but because of their proximity to the placenta and the fact that bits of placenta may cling to the seeds, they can absorb capsaicin and effectively be quite hot. No other part of the chile produces capsaicin. The “burn” we experience from an abundance of capsaicin in our mouths stimulates the body to produce natural endorphins—pain killers our bodies make that create a good feeling. Eating a hot pepper just may be the high point of your day.
THE ORGANIC FACTOR
Insects tend to avoid capsicum. So, most chiles are not sprayed. (In fact, gardeners use hot chiles to make a bug-repelling spray.) But choose organic chiles for their superior culinary quality.
NUTRITION
A green chile pod contains three times the vitamin C of a Valencia orange and the entire minimum daily requirement. When the pods ripen and turn red, the provitamin A levels increase to twice that of a carrot. Even when they’re dried, chiles retain their nutritional power and their pungency. Just 1⁄2 tablespoon of red chili powder furnishes the minimum daily requirement of vitamin A.
TYPES
The different types of spicy chiles available these days give the organic cook a wide palette of flavors to choose from. But these just scratch the surface. ....read more
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