Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

The reason I took away from this: large agricultural producers of peppers bred towards a "low heat, low variance" standard, away from a "high variance" standard that produced frequent hot jalapenos. Low-heat-low-variance is better for mass food production, because producers can just dose the capsaicin directly, which is something they can't do easily when every pepper is a wildcard.

There are second-order effects, like drip irrigation and cultivation techniques that optimize for shape, size, and color over heat --- but those are enabled by the industrial jalapeno's new position in the production chain. The peppers just aren't the point where the heat is introduced anymore; that happens later. Might as well optimize for good looking peppers.

This seems fine? Peppers are one of the easier and more forgiving things to grow yourself. Just grow your own or buy from a farmer's market.

Moments later, after reading the thread

This kind of stuff really seems to piss people off, but when you think about the disempowerment of the jalapeno, try to keep in mind that the same industrial processes have performed unalloyed positive things. Have you noticed that you're way more into brussels sprouts now than you were when you were a kid? If you're a GenX-er or a Millenial, that's because today's (delicious) sprouts aren't the same plant as the (gross) sprouts of yore. Same deal with broccolini, which hadn't even been invented until after your birthday (for most of you).

It's interesting how bad incentives are when something with qualitative differences (flavor, heat) is sold by the pound. Making it more palatable expands the market up to a point, but so does requiring more peppers generally.

The most durable countermeasure seems to be totally outside of the purview of economics: building up a culture of caring about the product. Like tomatoes in Italy, or coffee beans among coffee lovers.

For heat we've mostly had to rely on serrano or (when in season here) the Hungarian wax pepper (varies wildly between 1k and 15k scoville)

Many of the people in this threat at quoting their younger years. i didnt hear anyone quote,

> Taste Bud Density: Children have more taste buds than adults, and these are more sensitive. This heightened sensitivity can make certain flavors, especially bitter ones, more intense for children. The number of taste buds decreases as people age, which can lead to changes in taste sensitivity and preferences.

I've been on a salsa making kick lately and use chipotles, which are dried and smoked jalapenos. Raw plain jalapenos were never that attractive to me although I did eat them whole frequently when I worked in a mexican restaurant...

The chipotles I get are plenty spicy- 3 small chipotles is enough heat for an almost uncomfortably spicy salsa (in this case, I'm talking about a salsa is made just from the chipotle flesh and some spices and water). If it wasn't spicy enough, I'd add arbol chiles (just one) which are painfully spicy.

I don’t like more than a little spicy but I discovered that if you stand the jalapeño up and cut vertical panels leaving the core and seeds behind, they are essentially just sweet peppers with a little kick. It seems that almost all of the heat is in the seeds and the plith.

Wow, I was just telling my partner last week that the Jalapeños I'd bought were not spicy and it seemed like it was happening more and more often. I love Jalapeños with cheese and crackers and it sucks to cut up a whole jalapeño only to find I might as well just used a green pepper.

As a somewhat recent south Asian immigrant to the USA, I’ve always thought Jalapeños were meant to signify the lowest spice level.

Only recently, I discovered its actual reputation is to pack a punch.

I grew up with Thai chillies as to mean “the chilli”. I still put this stuff on anything that needs some chillies. And that really does pack a punch.

> ask a produce manager or a supplier if you can get Early or Mitla peppers, or if the store can label its pepper breeds

There are a lot of jalapeño varieties [1]. Ripe Biker Billies are about as hot as cayenne [2].

Looks like one can buy Mitla seeds on Amazon [3].

[1] https://pepperscale.com/jalapeno-varieties/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayenne_pepper

You might be interested in this YouTube video which discusses the issues of 'big seed' in regards to tomatoes. I'd imagine the same applies to any commercially grown crops (another comment mentioned that there is basically only one commercial variety of bananas), which would explain why jalapenos are less spicy than they used to be.

https://youtu.be/ngjAqzam0fU

TL;DW;

- Almost all commercially grown crops are from hybrids, which means two varieties bred to produce a new variety with the selected characteristics of both.

- The characteristics that are chosen are those which are most commercially viable: long shelf life, visually appealing, size uniformity - these are often at the detrement of other characteristics such as flavor, nutrients or in this case heat

- Hybrid plants usually do not 'remain true', meaning their offspring will not have the same characteristics. This means farmers need to buy new seed each year to maintain the same characteristics. This results in hybrid seeds being very valuable - some are worth 10x more per kg than gold.

- Hybrids seeds are produced by pollinating plants by hand. This is a time consuming process, and usually done in low income countries. That means labour laws are often ignored, and child labour is a big problem.

Same thing with mustard. Mustard used to be spicy, then "yellow mustard" came out, then yellow mustard became mustard, then actual mustard became "spicy mustard".

Fortunately it’s also easier than ever to get extremely high scoville hot sauces and peppers online to liven up my food.

Some Pepper X hot sauce is all I need now. I’m now on my third bottle and no restaurant dish in my local suburbia is spicy to me anymore.

I just use serranos now, they are usually hot, add more as needed.

I love jalapenos/chipotles but there are so many great pepper varieties out there, and I sometimes wonder why they are not mass produced as much.

For instance, I love hatch (Nex Mexico) chiles, but they seem quite difficult to get fresh outside of the region or at least during a very particular time of year. They are so much more flavorful than jalepenos imo, and have a similar amount of spice (not much). At least they are typically available canned, and they are still great.

One exception are Mrs. Renfro's pickled jalapeños, a Tex-Mex staple for decades. They're still quite hot. I wonder if they have special grower relationships?

I've always thought the California and Mexico weak peppers I got had more to do with irrigation practices than the varietal. But maybe it's both!

I remember the jalapenos from a local farm, which I haven't had for too long. They were all spicy, but it was well known that about 1:4 were wicked, very comparable to a conventional habanero.

I ferment habaneros and when I do, it's usually several pounds. I process by hand without gloves and evidence of this persists for days. It's only painful when exposed to heat, eg shower, handwash, etc. But as an avid capsaicin reservoir, I can attest that proper jalapenos can be surprisingly 'hot', while the typical store bought versions often can barely look a poblano in the eye without breaking a sweat.

Anecdote: Jalapenos really bother me, but I love them. I don't know what it is about them, but they give me days of problems when I eat more than a couple bites.

I can eat much spicier capsicum peppers than Jalapenos, and fresno peppers seem to give me no problems at all (which are the nearest cousin I've found to Jalapenos).

Does anyone know what I can do? Does my body's reaction to Jalapenos have to do with how ripe they are (green vs. red?), or is there any other reason or explanation by Jalapenos bother me but other peppers dont?

Those high variance peppers were the lifeblood of some recipes though. You need the occasional 5x hot pepper. Like I recently put 8 jalapeños and 20 habaneros into a seafood taco dish I used to make when craving spice and it wasn’t even a quarter as hot as it used to be. Buying from the same grocery store too. In the past I was running to get milk and sweating my face off. This time I had to add Pain 100% hot sauce onto the finished product. Not even a decade passed.

I’ve lost all confidence in my hot sauce recipe too now.

Being raised in New Mexico, I cannot stand jalapenos. They infect everything vaguely "mexican" themed, and have basically forced me to buy the mildest sauces and whatnot, only to have to add hatch peppers to bring them up to a suitable level of spice. And even then, with the more mild jalapenos we have now, you'll find them in reformulations of mild sauces, and so on a single taste I get that "hot screen door/cat vomit" flavor shining through. So I frequently have to change brands.

I miss territorial house salsa, but Pace killed them over 20 years ago, so I should probably move on

The article kind of mentions this but I think most professionals have shifted to serranos except when they want the big slices for a garnish or something. The shift was well underway when I was still cooking in the late 2000s, though I mostly heard consistency as the reason rather than heat.

I did notice that today’s jalapeños aren’t as spicy as they were even 10 years ago.

One time I had to check if I bought the right thing.

Now it makes sense that I wasn’t imagining it.

I had already planned to grow my own jalapeños in this year’s garden before I read this article.

around 1999/2000 we made frequent trips to Texas to visit family and I got addicted to then huge packs of jalapeño chips, they were so good I brought whole cartful back to New Zealand. The further I flew (2 stop overs coz I am cheap) the further Texans with cowboy hats in airport lounge would walk across to congratulate me on my hoard. Wonderful stuff. And they were spicy. I hope it wasn't just sprayed with some artificial flavouring. I'd love some modern day recommendations of a good jalapeño chips too, fellow connoisseurs of fine jalapeño chips.

I always presumed the heat was from the seeds and not the pepper its self.

I love spicy food, but I actually appreciate where jalapeños have ended up because I have family that _don't_ like spicy food so it's a good compromise for me.

Just last night, I ate some red jalapeños that I could barely taste at all. Not just not spicy - free of flavour.

Question to hot sauce lovers: I’m planning to go to mexico soon. any jalapeño sauce I should absolutely get?

> I searched the internet to see whether jalapeños are really getting milder, but only found shopping tips.

of course

Here are the key points about why jalapeño peppers are less spicy than ever:

1. Jalapeño peppers are deliberately being bred to be bigger, shinier, prettier - but less spicy and less flavorful. This is driven by demand from the processed food industry for consistency.

2. About 60% of jalapeños go to processing plants for things like canned peppers, salsas, sauces, etc. These companies want predictable, mild heat levels so they can accurately label products as "mild," "medium," "hot."

3. In the last 20 years, a very popular jalapeño variety called TAM II has taken over much of the market. It was specifically bred to be huge, shiny, and very mild - less than 10% as spicy as traditional jalapeños.

4. The invention and popularity of TAM jalapeños is making the overall jalapeño gene pool larger but milder. Hotter, more flavorful varieties are losing ground.

5. There are still hotter jalapeño varieties like Mitla and Early jalapeños, but many restaurants and home cooks don't know to ask for specific pepper breeds.

6. Some experts draw comparisons to the tomato industry - mass-produced tomatoes lost flavor, but heirlooms are bringing it back. Perhaps hotter heirloom pepper varieties could also regain popularity.

I really wish consumers understood how produce works. :-(

There is no single food called "a Jalapeño". In the Solanaceae family, in the Capsicum genus, in the annuum sub-genus, there are dozens of hybrid and cultivar fruiting plants, which are all referred to as "Jalapeño". They all have different properties in how they grow and what they turn into. This includes taste, size, color, shape, and spiciness. (https://www.thechileman.org/results.php?chile=1&find=Jalapen...)

If you want to buy "a Jalapeño", or any kind of produce, and have a reliable experience, you can't just wander into a random store and pick up a generic name for 40 different cultivars, made god knows where and how, shipped to your neighborhood god knows how, and expect that the thing you selected is exactly what you wanted.

Imagine you want a burger. You go to the Big Burger Mart. From a giant bin labeled "Burger", you pick one Burger. You take it home and eat it. Will it be the burger you expected, from the place you expected, tasting the way you expected? Maybe not! But it's An Burger! You didn't seem to care what kind of burger it was when you picked it out of a big bin called "Burger". You didn't ask where it came from, how it was prepared, how long it's been sitting there, etc. So you can't really expect anything but "Generic Burger", which personally doesn't sound very tasty.

To get the produce you expect, you should buy a specific cultivar of produce from a reliable producer. And you're probably gonna need to buy it locally, because the food logistics chain delivering a pepper from Chile all the way to Nebraska is not going to result in an ideal pepper. Another way to get what you expect is to grow it yourself. Many jalapeño cultivars (and other peppers!) grow well in containers. If you want to skip the whole gardening thing, you can buy a pre-grown bush of jalapeño online from a nursery like Bonnie, and just keep it alive and enjoy fresh peppers indefinitely.

I actually feel bad for the supermarkets. They have to read the minds of customers that demand so much, feed back that information to growers about what to grow, and then get it into the stores, with 365-days-a-year perfect consistency, unblemished, "ripe", and tasty. It's an impossible task. Yet they pull it off, even to the point that people have grown up their whole lives not knowing what it is they're buying or how it gets into their shopping cart. But that doesn't stop people complaining about it.

I've never seen the word "breed" applied to plant cultivars before. Is that a common American thing?

I get not a lot of people here have been growing their own peppers. I say that because if one goes to their local garden center right now and buys a jalapeño seedling, puts it in a fairly large pot and gives it a regular dose of N and a daily dose of water and puts outside in the 65-80F weather for the next few months it will produce peppers that are very large and taste pretty similar to the ones in the grocery store. Pick, them just as they reach an couple inches in length before they start to ripen and taste them.

Then if one lives in the south, brings it inside next year over the winter, and stop fertilizing it, and reduces watering it to once a week or so, it will again produce peppers next year that will be a lot hotter, but during the summer if you live in somewhere its getting over 100F daily, stop watering it until it starts to drop its leaves and pull it back from the brink of death ever couple weeks over the summer. The last peppers to set in the late spring early summer will only grow to be an inch or so long and the plant will stubbornly refuse to drop them even when they start to shrivel a bit and its lost most of its full size leaves only sprouting 1/4" long leaves during the short periods of recovery when the soil isn't bone dry. Then after a couple months when those peppers get really dark before they start to turn red, pick one and taste it.

The second year that plan will produce peppers hotter than probably anything most people have ever tasted. But, the plant will get strong and gnarly, continue to mistreat it for another year or two and what you will have is a pepper that no one can actually eat.

In my 20's I found pleasure in sampling top ten lists of hottest hot sauces and peppers, but nothing prepared me for the pepper I pulled off a ~5 year old jalapeño plant I had largely been ignoring all summer long and hadn't been fertilized since it was a seedling. A single bite, and about two chews, and I went into an upper body "hickup" that might be better described as a repeating upper body spasm, and a mouth burn unlike anything I've ever experience before or since. Those are peppers one should pick with gloves.

Pepper genetics or even variety aren't the largest dictator of how hot a pepper is. A bigger factor is how they are grown. Give a young plant a 70-80F pleasant environment, plenty of water and nutrient rich soil and they produce lots and lots of peppers that vary only slightly in heat based on their variety. Exactly what a commercial grower will do to maximize yield. Keep a plant on life support for multiple years and it will be an ugly thing, producing only a few peppers that grow slowly and ripen slowly over months, stress it to the point where its largely dropped all its leaves and only has a few small leaves baked daily in full 100F+ sun and it will produce peppers that are by themselves in-edible.

I was in Mexico a few years ago and my I remember one of my kids pointing out that the Jalapeño Doritos here were spicier. Ive growing jalapeños for years in the north of US and they come out mild. I always thought to be related to cooler rainier climate.

As a frequent eater of jalapeños and other raw peppers, this is true and frustrating.

I am more dissatisfied with the constant mold than with the occasional spicy but as a free market capitalist how can I single the market when supply side has made a decision.

Obligatory internet joke:

https://www.angelfire.com/az/bonespage/jindex/chili.html

The article doesn't contain the actual reason.

I'd argue that the real reason is that peppers are now mass produced in clean, bug-free, environments.

Which means: No bug bites, no spice.

If you grow peppers indoors where no bugs are, they tend to be a very mild produce. If you put them outside (and have enough insects around), they get much more spicy.

Of course the usage of pesticides contributes to that effect, due to bugs not having a chance to bite the fruits anymore.

Weird that the rise of the not-spicy pepper coincided with a societal surge in desire for heat.

In general any sort of produce available in North America suffers from blandness. Try a tomato in Southern or Eastern Europe by way of comparison.