Favorite Chili Pepper

[Zeedman]

"Beaver Dam Pepper worked wonderfully for us this summer in our garden’s 5,000' elevation in sandy loam with 5% humidity. Heirloom" So reports grower on Fedco Seed

This looks like a good choice for me. I will hope that it is a little spicier than Anaheim. It's not that I don't appreciate the Anaheim peppers that I have grown for years. It's that I didn't even know that it was considered a hot for the first few of those years.

Anaheims are pretty weak; of popular hot peppers, only pepperoncini has less heat. Pelso has an amount of heat similar to Anaheim. Beaver Dam is somewhere in the neighborhood of Poblano for heat... pleasant, but not scorching. It also adds wonderful flavor to anything it is cooked with, we love it with pepper steak.

 

[Dahlia]

I've heard cherry peppers are good if you like mild peppers. For medium hot I like serranos. They make awesome homemade tamales!

 

[ninnymary]

Just started some seeds of jalapeno, shishi to, habanada, Jimmy Nardello, and casabel. Still need to plant Fushimi that one is also mild.

Mary

 

[Artichoke Lover]

Hey everyone, I'm looking for a good mild chili pepper to grow for canning diced tomatoes and chilis. We buy so many from the store, and it seems silly to buy something I know I can grow myself. The problem is my tongue does not love being burnt to a crisp, and many of the peppers I grow are for my husband. <-- my mouth looks like this after a Habanero, to say nothing of the spicier ones!

I can’t even handle a plain jalapeño much less a habanero. I am growing some this year(habaneros) but just for fun and just 2 plants since I doubt they’ll get used.

I've heard cherry peppers are good if you like mild peppers. For medium hot I like serranos. They make awesome homemade tamales!

I didn’t know this! We’re growing them this year to make special kind chili sauce that we normally put on our tamales! I didn’t know you could use them in tamales I might have to try that! I admittedly don’t eat the chili sauce it’s to spicy for me.

 

[AMKuska]

OMG-- @Artichoke Lover , can I have your Tamale recipe??? PLEASE?

 

[Artichoke Lover]

OMG-- @Artichoke Lover , can I have your Tamale recipe??? PLEASE?

I’ll try to find it later tonight!

 

[Artichoke Lover]

OMG-- @Artichoke Lover , can I have your Tamale recipe??? PLEASE?

I wasn’t able to find our recipe. But it’s just this one with a few things we’ve adjusted over the years. But I think that was mainly the amount of spice and that’s just personal taste. This I what we normally use for the cornmeal

It’s also good to have at least 1 extra set of hands for rolling the tamales. Let me know how it turns out!
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/hot-tamales-recipe-2011883 (totally forgot to add the link when I first posted this lol)

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I'm a chili wimp, so the only hot peppers I have ever grown were two years ago, when the "grooved muskmelon shaped Amazonian peppers" I had gotten from Joe Simcox's website some years previously (which were sold as sweet peppers) turned out to actually have a tiny bit of heat (something along pepperoncini levels). Probably not a great choice (the peppers were productive, but are pretty small) but they made good salsa.
I am also constantly playing around with Rocoto peppers (trying to find if it is possible to breed a non spicy one) but haven't had much luck (you'd think a pepper whose selling point is being more cold resistant would like it here, but it turns out that, like a lot of Peruvian/Andean crops, what it REALLY likes is cool weather that lasts on and on, both cold AND heat cause it problems.)

 

[Zeedman]

I am also constantly playing around with Rocoto peppers (trying to find if it is possible to breed a non spicy one) but haven't had much luck (you'd think a pepper whose selling point is being more cold resistant would like it here, but it turns out that, like a lot of Peruvian/Andean crops, what it REALLY likes is cool weather that lasts on and on, both cold AND heat cause it problems.)

I've never tried to grow any C. pubescens peppers (such as Rocotos), but aren't they photo-period sensitive? Have you been bringing the plants indoors, to winter over?

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I usually can't even get the seed to GERMINATE (and this is a problem with multiple vendors for the seed, so it probably isn't a packager issue).

Oddly, there is a chili vendor at the USQ farmer's market who DOES sell fresh rocotos*, and those they would have to be growing themselves under farmer's market rules. Maybe they are bringing the plants in over the winter but that seems like a lot of work for one more kind of chili (that isn't that popular based on what I have heard, and they don't get a lot of anyway)

*Which may or may not be pure. Some of these pepper have the normal black seeds, but some have seeds that are dirty tan, which might indicate being some sort of hybrid that is more day length neutral.