Wapsi Square Forum

So I put the unused peppers in a paper lunch bag, and after a day of doing nothing, they put on a nice glow.
I was rewarded with a little bit of heat, which confirms my suspicions of early harvesting. Debating on wild planting the seeds to see what happens.

DinkyInky wrote:So I put the unused peppers in a paper lunch bag, and after a day of doing nothing, they put on a nice glow.
I was rewarded with a little bit of heat, which confirms my suspicions of early harvesting. Debating on wild planting the seeds to see what happens.

Check out the selection from Redwood City Seed Company, if you're of a mind to suffer a bit of pepper-variety envy.

I recall that The Pepper Lady has an excellent list, also.

DinkyInky wrote:So I put the unused peppers in a paper lunch bag, and after a day of doing nothing, they put on a nice glow.
I was rewarded with a little bit of heat, which confirms my suspicions of early harvesting.

That could just be Cherenkov radiation. Which could also explain the heat.

Debating on wild planting the seeds to see what happens.

You could divide up the seeds and do different things with different batches, creating all sorts of weird new hybrids. Which you can then cross with each other to make even more, and before you know it your home will be overflowing with bizarre mutant pepper plants that will brighten the place up and provide mysterious fruits and eat salesmen and oxygenate the air and leave the toilet seats up.

Dave wrote:

DinkyInky wrote:So I put the unused peppers in a paper lunch bag, and after a day of doing nothing, they put on a nice glow.
I was rewarded with a little bit of heat, which confirms my suspicions of early harvesting. Debating on wild planting the seeds to see what happens.

Check out the selection from Redwood City Seed Company, if you're of a mind to suffer a bit of pepper-variety envy.

I recall that The Pepper Lady has an excellent list, also.

Truth be told, all I have to do is get my brother to piss off my Mother while she's planting a few choice peppers, and they will be hellishly hot, then wait until they mature, and pay him to ship me a seed packet.
I wild plant my peppers, that is, I take seeds and scatter them in a plot of soil. Wildly growing, they often cross pollinate making neat results for the next seasons.

How does your mother's anger make the peppers hotter?

Don't get me wrong, the fury of a mother is not to be trifled with, but I didn't know it could alter young, impressionable plants into being hotheaded and out to cause trouble on the tongues of anyone foolish enough to eat them.

GlytchMeister wrote:How does your mother's anger make the peppers hotter?

Don't get me wrong, the fury of a mother is not to be trifled with, but I didn't know it could alter young, impressionable plants into being hotheaded and out to cause trouble on the tongues of anyone foolish enough to eat them.

I dunno, but the years where we were nice, helpful, and let her do her thing, the peppers were mild. The years where she had me plant the peppers, I told my brother to make me rage, because I really couldn't risk the little darlings turning out mild. Cannot explain it, but it works. Yes, if I plant a pepper garden, someone is going to make me angry...I'm counting on it.

PoopyHead!

TazManiac wrote:PoopyHead!

I just told my sister about this conversation, and got to your response, and she's dying here. Loads of laughter, my expense.

DinkyInky wrote:

GlytchMeister wrote:How does your mother's anger make the peppers hotter?

Don't get me wrong, the fury of a mother is not to be trifled with, but I didn't know it could alter young, impressionable plants into being hotheaded and out to cause trouble on the tongues of anyone foolish enough to eat them.

I dunno, but the years where we were nice, helpful, and let her do her thing, the peppers were mild. The years where she had me plant the peppers, I told my brother to make me rage, because I really couldn't risk the little darlings turning out mild. Cannot explain it, but it works. Yes, if I plant a pepper garden, someone is going to make me angry...I'm counting on it.

There is strength in words and motion. In another lifetime I played on a co-ed softball team. If we happened to be short players for a game, I would lightheartedly do a "rain dance" and amazingly we would be rained out that game. It worked on a regular basis. But then one week we were to face the top team in the league and we were going to be way short of bodies. So I did an enthusiastic performance. Hurricane Alicia hit the Texas coast that week. I swore off fooling with Ma Nature.

DinkyInky wrote:

TazManiac wrote:PoopyHead!

I just told my sister about this conversation, and got to your response, and she's dying here. Loads of laughter, my expense.

Somewhere I have a black sweatshirt with this logo on it;



It's from Dr. Loco's Rockin Jalapeño Band, and had the tag line

"Picante el Sabroso"

So, you keep it Hot and Spicy, ya hear?...

Just gonna put this here...

Theresa Morgan wrote: "Luckily the fire brigade took it well. But they did tell us it was the most stupid thing they'd been sent out for in 20 years."

Fixed that bad linky...

So I've been feeling off lately, and thought some spicy Asian comfort food would help...but the soup had more fire than the main course.

I felt like Sydney complaining about getting baby food.

Well, the soup comforted, by about 400k scoville, but the main had maybe a few hundred.

Yay!

DinkyInky wrote:

GlytchMeister wrote:How does your mother's anger make the peppers hotter?

I dunno, but the years where we were nice, helpful, and let her do her thing, the peppers were mild.

In reading some advice on raising habaneros and Scotch Bonnet peppers, I learned that these varieties of peppers have a great need for calcium and phosphorus in the soil in order to grow properly. Without enough calcium the leaves develop a wrinkled appearance. The writer strongly encourages adding a handful of bone meal to the soil on a regular basis to provide these critical nutrients. Fish emulsion or blood meal can be added as well, and the whole combination watered into the soil.

Perhaps this might be the answer to your puzzle? When your mother was particularly angry, perhaps the pepper garden was where she chose to dispose of the, err, remains of her anger (so to speak)?

Dave wrote:

DinkyInky wrote:

GlytchMeister wrote:How does your mother's anger make the peppers hotter?

I dunno, but the years where we were nice, helpful, and let her do her thing, the peppers were mild.

Perhaps this might be the answer to your puzzle? When your mother was particularly angry, perhaps the pepper garden was where she chose to dispose of the, err, remains of her anger (so to speak)?

{Insert "Berwyn!" Soundbite here}

Dave wrote:In reading some advice on raising habaneros and Scotch Bonnet peppers, I learned that these varieties of peppers have a great need for calcium and phosphorus in the soil in order to grow properly. Without enough calcium the leaves develop a wrinkled appearance. The writer strongly encourages adding a handful of bone meal to the soil on a regular basis to provide these critical nutrients. Fish emulsion or blood meal can be added as well, and the whole combination watered into the soil.

Capsaicinoid levels in peppers is partly determined by genotype, and partly by environmental factors. There's not a lot that you can do to a pepper plant to change the former; you just have to hope that you planted a variety that has the potential level of spiciness that you want. There isn't really much that you can do to make a mild genotype produce very hot fruit.

You can mess around with the environmental factors, however, to increase or decrease whatever default level of spiciness your pepper has. The spicy capsaicinoid chemicals are first made after the flower has fully blossomed, and are produced by an enzyme called capsaicin synthase (CS) putting together various other chemicals that are floating around in the fruit. After a bit of time, a bunch of other enzymes such as peroxidase start to break down the capsaicinoids. The amount of activity shown by each of these two groups of enzymes varies over the course of the fruit's forming and ripening: the ones making capsaicinoids are more active towards the early days, the ones tearing them apart are more active later on. If you want a spicy pepper, you want to increase the ability of CS to make capsaicinoids and also decrease the ability of the enzymes that break stuff down. As a general rule, causing stress to the plant while it is forming its fruits tends to increase the concentrations of capsaicinoids.

The exact specifics of how much and when to do whatever is really hard to pinpoint, however, because different types of pepper plants have different tolerances and react in different ways. What will cause a relatively drastic change in capsaicinoid levels in one type might not have any impact on a different one, which might need more or less of whatever change you made. So the only real way to determine the best amounts of what to change to make your plants spicy is to experiment with several generations of them. If you don't have a clue as to the pedigree of your plant, then it's all going to be guesswork.

Water stress is a relatively easy way to increase concentrations of capsaicinoids in the pepper. What you do is keep the plant well watered while it is growing and blossoming. As soon as the flowers fully open, though, you water the plant as rarely as it can survive. This will probably be somewhere around once every eight or nine days. Some types of pepper can handle longer periods, some shorter. The right amount of time should result in a horribly wilted looking plant that will fully revive within four to six hours of being watered. Once you get to the point where it doesn't revive, then you'll know that you've exceeded the plant's limit. . .

This will greatly cut back on the number of fruit that will ripen on the plant. As in, you might get a quarter of the normal yield if you are lucky. The lack of water will also hinder the ability of CS to produce capsaicinoids. The most important result, however, is that it will far more hinder the ability of the enzymes that break up the capsaicinoids. The fruits will produce the spiciness slower, but will build up greater levels of it. You'll have less peppers, but they'll be hotter.

The breaking-up enzymes will still eventually make inroads on the capsaicinoids, however, so if you let the fruits ripen too much then you'll start to lose spiciness. Again, it's a matter of trial and error to figure out just the right time to pick them. Generally, it will be somewhere around 45 days after flowering.

The presence of salicylic acid has been shown to potentially boost spiciness by increasing the amount of the building-blocks available for CS to put together into capsaicinoids, but those tests were all done with specimens of cells removed from the pepper fruit and dumped into petri dishes or whatever rather than with a whole intact plant. I have no idea of how to go about trying to add it to a growing plant with ripening fruit, or even if that would be a good idea. The closest you could get to duplicating the test conditions would be to inject the stuff straight into the epidermal cells of the interlocular septum, but that just seems like it would be kind of a weird thing to do. Perhaps you can just bury some aspirin in the soil.

On that subject: preparing the soil properly can also help, not so much in increasing spiciness but more in helping to offset the lower number of fruits that stressing the plant causes.

Red soils are usually high in iron compounds, and pepper plants don't do as well in those. Something with a lot of organic material mixed in is best. Applying the right amounts of the right fertilisers also helps, of course. With a typical N-P-K fertiliser, the nitrate part of it is the one known to be most important in making lots of flowers and fruits. A fertiliser that will have about a 15mM concentration of N in the form of urea seems to give the best results. The K is actually pretty irrelevant to pepper plants, and might even have a negative impact at anything more than low concentrations. As far as I know, nobody's done much research on the P levels, so you're on your own there. Maybe that's something that you can let the kid experiment on, and then you two can publish a paper in some scientific journal on phosphate influences on spiciness. “Inky, D. and Spawn. 2016. The Influence of Phosphate Levels on Making Bleh Peppers into Tasty Mini-Apocalypses of Spicy Doom. Journal of Culinary Catastrophes: 40-2079.”

To take up the nitrogen, though, the plants need to have the right bacteria glomped onto their roots. Azotobacter chroococcum (I think that I got all the o's and c's in the right places there) seems to be a really good one for pepper plants. You'll need to dip the roots of the young plants into the stuff to get a good inoculation. A good root culture of that can boost your pepper harvest 250% compared to just using a bunch of chemical fertiliser.

Ah, yes... the old starve-you-til-you're-almost-dead-then-revive-you routine...

- But how will you know when to stop?
- Well, if you die, I'll know I waited too long...

Catawampus, wow dude. You knowz stuff.

(Dang it, I hate finding out a little bit of something interesting, now I have to go find out more about it...)

lake_wrangler wrote:Ah, yes... the old starve-you-til-you're-almost-dead-then-revive-you routine...

- But how will you know when to stop?
- Well, if you die, I'll know I waited too long...

lake_wrangler wrote:Ah, yes... the old starve-you-til-you're-almost-dead-then-revive-you routine...

- But how will you know when to stop?
- Well, if you die, I'll know I waited too long...

Could that be where ghost peppers come from?

TazManiac wrote:Catawampus, wow dude. You knowz stuff.

(Dang it, I hate finding out a little bit of something interesting, now I have to go find out more about it...)

I was going from memory, which means that it's all a few years out of date and may be partly superseded by new research. They've probably published some new articles on the subject (I know that the Mexican government was really pushing for more research on habaneros and especially on how to make them hotter), and might have done things such as figured out what role phosphates play in them or what the catabolic enzyme paths are for capsaicinoids. Or maybe they haven't.

I picked up a bottle of Melinda's Naga Jolokia sauce from World Market last night, on the way home from getting takeout at Tommy Thai, as I'd pretty much run out of hot sauce in the house (and I order the Thai stuff "mild" so my wife can eat it).

Given all I'd heard about the Naga Jolokia / Ghost pepper, I was apprehensive about trying this. I didn't want to spend the evening crying, coughing, drinking yogurt and drooling it out again, etc. like the guy in the Ghost Pepper Challenge YouTube video did.

After one meal with the stuff: not bad at all. I put a few drops on the plate and dipped individual pieces of food into it, getting a half-drop to a single drop worth on (e.g.) a mushroom. The Melinda's has a definite flavor, thanks to the papaya and carrot and passionfruit... they describe it as a Carribean-tropical. Some people reportedly find it bitter but I didn't have that particular sensation - maybe there's batch-to-batch variation, maybe some people have taster genes I don't. At this level of use it's not all that hot (by my standards, not those of a normal and sane person). The ingredients list puts the Naga Jolokia peppers first (which should mean that they're the most prevalent ingredient by weight) but it wasn't overwhelming.

Once I felt safe with it, I added it more liberally to the sauces of the Thai and Cambodian curries. It added a nice kick, both immediately and thereafter... my mouth and lips were glowing happily for 10-15 minutes after I finished eating.

No unpleasant aftereffects this morning. I'll definitely be using more of this in the weeks to come. I will not be offering any to my wife.

I did see a couple of Scorpion Pepper sauces on the shelf at World Market, and passed 'em up for now. One of them was a Dave's brand, and I'm not fond of Dave's since they use a lot of pepper extract rather than whole peppers - the result is hotter but I think they taste "burnt".

(Side note: Tommy Thai makes the best Tom Kha soup we've ever had. They have Cambodian specialties, of which my favorite is Salaw Machou Ktis - "Cambodian stew with coconut milk, fresh pineapple, baby corn, mushroom, lemongrass, Kaffir lime leaf and Ma-om". I order it made with rock cod; it's absolutely to die for.)