Chili Peppers of the World: Cultivars, Species, and Heat
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Capsicum annuum Capsicum annuum starts in Mexico, which should probably be more well known, and it's the reason this project lives in my Desert Mexico section. Six thousand years of farmers deciding which plants were worth saving seeds from, and the result is a single species that contains bell peppers and jalapeños and anchos and cayennes and serranos and guajillos and poblanos, essentially the entire working vocabulary of Mexican cooking, plus a significant portion of everyone else's. No other domesticated chile comes close to this range. You can spend a lifetime cooking with C. annuum and never hit the edges of it, which is either a testament to the people who built it over millennia or an argument for never leaving Mexico, depending on your priorities. Bell Pepper Breeders selected the heat out entirely: what's left is crunch, sweetness, and color. The breeding of large, capsaicin-free peppers predates the age of Columbus, probably by hundreds of years. Green bells are just unripe; red, orange, and yellow are the same fruit left on the plant longer, sweeter, higher in vitamin C. My wife spent years avoiding the green ones for exactly that reason, until one day she bit into a fresh one and something clicked: that raw, grassy crunch, that sharp brightness the ripe ones don't have. The most widely planted pepper on earth, mild enough for everyone, and capable, apparently, of surprise. Heat: 0 SHU. Origin: Mesoamerica, later developed widely in Europe and North America. Jalapeño Pepper Mexico's most exported chili, probably the most recognized pepper on earth, coming from Veracruz, where it was traditionally smoked and dried into what we now call chipotle, a preparation so widely commercialized that most people encounter it backwards, learning chipotle first. Fresh, it shows up in salsas and guacamole; smoked, it turns up in everything from taco sauces to BBQ rubs. When I lived in Los Angeles, I used the Angeleno pronunciation for this pepper: "halla-pen-yo", and unwittingly kept saying it the same way when I moved to Portland, where people say “hallapeeno”.
Ordered a pizza, rattled it off at the counter, and the Mexican-American man taking my order stopped, looked up, and said: "Sir, are you making fun of me?" Heat: 2,500-8,000 SHU. Origin: Veracruz, Mexico. Dried: Chipotle Featured sauce: Hella Hot Jalapeño Cucumber Hot Sauce Cayenne Pepper Cayenne is the pepper that conquered the world by being useful rather than interesting. Slender, cooperative, dries into a clean red powder without complaint, and Portuguese traders moved it through West Africa and India in the 1500s and it just kept going, embedding itself in cuisines that now can't imagine life before it. Louisiana eventually claimed it for hot sauce. The spice rack claimed it for everything else. It's named after the capital of French Guiana, a jungle-wrapped French territory most people couldn't place on a map, which is fine because the pepper doesn't need the publicity. Heat: 30,000-50,000 SHU. Origin: French Guiana (named for the city of Cayenne); spread globally through Portuguese and Spanish trade. Dried: Cayenne powder Featured sauce: Frank's RedHot Cayenne Pepper Sauce Poblano Pepper The pepper of Puebla. Poblano peppers are known as both fresh and dry peppers. Dry it and it becomes an ancho, or a mulato. These dried forms create mole negro, mole poblano, sauces that take days and smell like a whole city cooking. Keep it fresh they become chile rellenos: thick walls, lots of smokiness, but also mild enough that you can eat three before you notice. I'm not much of a cook, but chopped poblano simmered in garlic and oil until just soft, then folded into scrambled eggs. That I can manage. Heat: 1,000-2,000 SHU. Origin: Puebla, Mexico. Dried: Ancho / Mulato Banana Pepper The banana pepper is a pepper in permanent adolescence: mild, bright yellow, and almost always encountered pickled in a jar next to the olive bar.
It has found its niche not in great cuisines but in everyday sandwiches, hoagies, and antipasto plates, where its pickled vinegary tang does more heavy lifting than its heat ever could. Heat: 0-500 SHU. Origin: Developed in the United States from Capsicum annuum lines. Fresno Pepper Clarence Brown Hamlin bred it in 1952 and named it for the California city where it first went into the ground. Ripe and red, it runs fruitier and a little brighter than a jalapeño, not just hotter, but different in character, which is why it shows up in salsas and hot sauces that want flavor doing as much work as the heat. Bartenders figured this out, and so they use fresnos when they need more heat and more color.
Think: spicy margaritas, chili-infused syrups and spirits that need heat with color. Heat: 2,500-10,000 SHU. Origin: California, United States. Featured sauce: Pulp Chili Fresno Chili Hot Sauce Chiltepin Pepper The chiltepin is the mother of all Mexican chiles. Wild, undomesticated, and still dispersed by birds across Mexico, Central America and northern South America just as it was thousands of years ago. Indigenous peoples have harvested it from desert scrub for millennia; the Tohono O'odham called it tepin, the Aztec used it in medicine and cooking both. It is legally protected in the United States, and in Mexico, its conservation is becoming more of a priority, which makes the fact that it's hotter than a jalapeño by a factor of twenty very, very cool. Chiltepins are very similar to tepins, but think of chiltepins as being smaller and more influenced by wild evolution, whereas Tepins are more associated with U.S. deserts, and more influenced by cultivation, making them slightly larger. Heat: 50,000-100,000 SHU. Origin: Northern Mexico and the Desert Southwest. Shishito Pepper The shishito arrived in American restaurants around 2010 and almost immediately became a fixture on every small-plates menu from Brooklyn to Portland. In Japan, it's been blistered in oil and salted as a snack for much longer.
The name comes from the Japanese for lion's head, a reference to the wrinkled tip. One in ten is hot. Regulars argue whether that ratio has changed. It probably hasn't. Grilling shishitos in olive oil and salt is one of my favorite moments of summertime. Heat: 50-200 SHU. Origin: Japan, from East Asian Capsicum annuum cultivation. Paprika Pepper My older brother makes his own smoked paprika from local peppers. The difference from the tin is not subtle: it smells like something actually happened to it, and the flavor hits in a way that store-bought just doesn't. Paprika peppers are mild, thick-fleshed, bred for drying and grinding rather than eating fresh. Hungary and Spain turned them into culinary traditions, goulash, chorizo, pimentón, but the pepper itself is older than either of those cuisines, an American plant that found its second life in European hands. Making it yourself, as my brother figured out, is a reminder of this chili’s incredible power on cuisine. Heat: 250-1,000 SHU, often lower. Origin: New World origins, later strongly developed in Hungary and Spain. Serrano Pepper The serrano is what the jalapeño thinks it is. Smaller, hotter, and it stays crisp when you eat it raw, which matters, because this is a fresh chile, not a dried one. It goes into pico de gallo and guacamole and anywhere else you want heat that bites clean rather than builds slow. Named for the mountain ridges of Puebla and Hidalgo where it came from, it's still one of the most grown chiles in Mexico. The jalapeño gets the fame. The serrano gets used. Heat: 10,000-23,000 SHU. Origin: The Mexican highlands, especially Puebla and Hidalgo. Anaheim Pepper Anaheim peppers go back to a New Mexico chile strain which were brought to Southern California around 1900 by Emilio Ortega, the same man whose name is seen on chili products across North America. He founded one of the first Mexican food companies in the United States. The name stuck to the California-grown version, while the same plant dried red became the Colorado chile.
It remains the go-to pepper for roasting in the Southwestern kitchen: it’s mild enough for a crowd, substantial enough to carry a dish. Heat: 500-2,500 SHU. Origin: New Mexico stock later developed in California, United States. Dried: Colorado Mirasol Pepper You probably recognize the mirasol pepper for its fruits which grow facing upwards, which is exactly what its name means. Once dried, it becomes ‘guajillo’, and at that point it's practically everywhere: enchilada sauces, adobos, mole rojo, things you've eaten a hundred times. Mild heat, fruity, not complicated. It's not the chile anyone gets excited about, which is maybe the point. Some ingredients just hold things together without making a fuss about it. Heat: 2,500-5,000 SHU. Origin: Zacatecas and Durango, Mexico. Dried: Guajillo Chilaca Pepper The chilaca is the fresh form that most people never see, because almost all of them become pasilla. Dried and dark, the pasilla (little raisin) earns its name from the wrinkled skin it develops in drying. It's one of the three dried chiles, along with ancho and mulato, that form the backbone of classic mole negro, a sauce with a recipe list so long it became a test of a cook's patience and skill. Heat: 1,000-2,500 SHU. Origin: Michoacán and Guerrero, Mexico. Dried: Pasilla Hungarian Wax Pepper The Hungarian wax looks like it should be mild, that pale yellow waxy skin suggesting a banana pepper, but it can carry real heat, sometimes running hotter than it has any business doing at that color stage. In Central European kitchens it's a standard pickling pepper, the kind that ends up in jars on a shelf without much fanfare, doing quiet useful work. In Hungarian cooking it gets stuffed with meat and rice and simmered in tomato sauce, which is a preparation that has been feeding people through long winters for generations and which takes on a certain extra dimension when the pepper you chose turns out to be one of the hot ones. You find out halfway through the bowl. There are worse surprises. Heat: 5,000-15,000 SHU.