Antknee's Aquaponics Blog

People who live in Latin America, India, Africa or Asia, rarely eat a meal that doesn’t include Peppers. In fact, some folks travel with their own supply of homemade, signature hot sauce! Peppers’ fruity flavors, rainbow colors and spicy heat turn up the volume and ardent love of many foods. Every cuisine has its preferred variety and special impassioned way with them. Growing some of these unusual and often hard-to-find Peppers can open up a whole new world of unbridled culinary adventure. Peppers are easy to grow and harvest, and so easy to use fresh, frozen, dried or canned, for dishes that warm body and soul all year long.


Turn Up the Heat
Peppers have been cultivated as a food crop for more than 6,000 years, yet were virtually unknown outside of Central and South America. It was Christopher Columbus who brought Peppers to Spain in the late 1400s: within 100 years, they were incorporated into cuisines all over the world. The old adage “you can’t tell a book by its cover’ definitely applies to Chile Peppers. Some of the hottest Peppers on earth are cute little red guys no bigger than your thumb. But, man alive, can they inflict bodily damage and emotional scars. Thankfully,  Wilbur Scoville invented a way to rate the piquancy of a Chile Pepper so you can assess the risk, or for avowed Chileheads~the thrill, before you venture a bite.

Born in Bridgeport Connecticut on January 22nd, 1865, Wilbur Lincoln Scoville was a chemist, award-winning researcher, professor of pharmacology and the second vice-chairman of the American Pharmaceutical Association. His book, The Art of Compounding, makes one of the earliest mentions of milk as an antidote for pepper heat. He is perhaps best remembered for his organoleptic test, which uses human testers to measure pungency in peppers.

The Scoville Scale measures the amount of capsaicin in a Pepper, which is the chemical compound that makes our skin tingle delightfully, break out in a worrisome rash, or burn with a sense of panic.


The test uses sugar to neutralize the heat; the more sugar that’s added, the higher the Scoville units and the hotter the pepper.

Some Like It Not So Hot
The hottest parts of a Chile Pepper are the seeds and the white membranes inside the fruit. To reduce the heat, just remove some or all of these parts. Roasting is another good way to calm the heat, as it converts some of the natural sugars into palatable sweet goodness. Place Peppers on a hot gas or charcoal grill, rotating them with tongs until all sides are charred, blistered and really black. Pile them into a paper bag on a sturdy tray so they steam each others’ skins off. Once they are cool enough to handle, put on some rubber gloves to protect your hands. Peel off the skins, remove the stems and slice into long pieces, scraping away the seeds. Use immediately or slip your prepared Peppers into zip-top plastic bags to savor as needed for sandwiches, sauces, stews and casseroles.

Have you ever put a bit too much Chile heat in a recipe? Don’t despair. You can disperse the capsaicin oil with another fat in the form of cheese, sour cream or butter, or use Scoville’s technique: add a little sugar to neutralize some of the heat. Start with a teaspoon and add more, tasting in between to make sure you’re not over-sweetening the dish. In fact, if you love the rich complex flavor of Chile Peppers but can’t take the heat, use some of your harvest to make your own sweet Asian Chile sauce~good on everything from spring rolls to turkey sandwiches, it’s an easy combination of chopped seeded Peppers, sugar, a little white vinegar and cornstarch, heated until thickened.

Peppers Are Easy To Grow From Seed
As you might imagine from their Mexican roots, Peppers perform best in hot, sunny, relatively dry conditions. Because Peppers take 75 to 80 days to mature, Chile Pepper seed is best started indoors under lights or in a greenhouse. Sow the seed in moist seed starting mix, about eight weeks before your spring Frost-Free Date. The warmth of a seed starting mat (up to 85 degrees F) will help speed germination. Once the seeds have sprouted (they can take up to two weeks, they’re a little pokey), give them 12 to 15 hours of bright light each day, very small drinks (do not overwater) and good ventilation. After they have two sets of true leaves, transplant the strongest seedlings into 4-inch pots and feed them weekly with a diluted liquid fertilizer.

Before transplanting your little Chile Pepper seedlings into the garden, harden them off by putting them outdoors in a sheltered location for a few hours each day and bringing them in at night. Do this for a week to 10 days, gradually lengthening the time outdoors. This will help them to avoid transplant shock and to thrive. No matter how warm you think it may be, hold off transplanting until after your spring Frost-Free Date and night time temperatures are reliably above 55 degrees F.

Peppers~especially Chile Peppers~need all-day sun and warmth. Plant the seedlings in fertile, well-draining soil, to which you have added compost, well-rotted manure and/or slow-release organic fertilizer. Pepper plants like to grow relatively close together. Space the seedlings so that by mid-summer, the leaves of neighboring plants will be touching each other, about 18 inches apart.Water moderately after planting and apply a 2” layer of mulch to help conserve moisture later on. Harvest carefully with a sharp knife: they don’t pluck off as easily as Tomatoes and you don’t want to rough up the plant.

Too Many Chile Peppers?
In native cultures, the traditional way to preserve Chile Peppers was air-drying. But Peppers of all kinds are also a snap to freeze. No need to blanche. Just cut the fruits open, remove their seeds and membranes (wear gloves to protect your hands from the capsaicin oil), slice or chop them and put them into zip-top bags. Use them as needed, right out of the bag. They thaw in minutes.