Compare and contrast

In the pepper world there is different tastes profiles, each pepper really has its own unique taste. Some may have a very fruity taste, while others may have a strong citrus flavor. You can taste some bitterness in some, and others have an acidic taste. While others still have a very nice smooth taste, and others have an all most floral taste. The heat levels are very different from one variety to another, from just a little heat all the way to weapons grade peppers. The best peppers in my opinion combine the best of worlds, heat and flavor.

Two of my favorite peppers have both of these features, but are two very different peppers. The first is the Fatalii pepper, which is an African pepper that is yellow in color. It is about three to four inches long and is shaped like a bit like a spear head that comes to a point. It has a very citrusy taste up front, all most lemon like, then a very nice kick of heat. It has thinner walls, so it makes for a great dehydrating pepper to make into powder. It makes a very flavorful hot sauce, and pairs well with fruit in a sauce. The foliage is a dark green, and it really just blends in with the rest of the plants.  The second pepper is the Chiero Roxo pepper from Brazil. It is about the size of a quarter and is shaped like a mushroom cloud. At mature color it is a very nice purple, with pink and white hues on one side. It has a very strong fruity taste upfront, all most sweet. It has just enough heat to remind you it’s a hot pepper, but very mild over all. It has a thicker skin so it is best suited for fresh eating or making sauce. The foliage is a stunning mix of black and purple, with just a hint of green towards the main stem. It sticks out from the other plants a lot because of this. Both are great peppers and have their place in my garden.

Taste and heat are two very different things if you ask me. It is rare that you find such a pepper that has both, but these two do just that. They may look and taste very different, but they both belong to the same botanical family, Capsicum Chinese. So see, they are very different, but similar at the same time.  I like the differences in these peppers the most though I think. Who would want the same thing over and over? Variety is the spice of life, and you need different flavors the keep your taste buds guessing. So go ahead and treat your tongue to a surprise, try something different.

                              

Process analysis

               First of all for a good hot sauce, you need good fresh organic produce. You can tell a big difference in taste if cheaper, not fresh ingredients are used. Most hot sauces are made of three basic ingredients, peppers, vinegar and salt. This particular style of sauce is from the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, so it has some added ingredients for sweetness and acidity for a more tropical sauce. The ingredients used in this sauce are: 12 chopped habaneros, ½ cup chopped carrots, ½ cup onion, 6 cloves of garlic, ½ cup white vinegar, 1/4 cup fresh lime juice, 1 tablespoon olive oil, and ½ cup water.

                Heat the olive oil in a pot over medium heat, then sauté the onion and garlic 2-3 minutes till they are soft. Add the chopped carrots and toss to mix, then sauté for 2-3 minutes. Pour the water of the mixture and bring this to a boil. Cover the pot with a lid once boiling, and reduce to a simmer for 30-40 minutes till the carrots are very soft. Once the carrots are soft transfer the mixture into a blender and add the habanero peppers. Blend for 3 minutes, till it is smooth with no pieces of vegetables in it. Pour this mixture back into the pot and add the lime juice, vinegar, salt and pepper. Mix well and bring to a simmer for 10 minutes. You can store this in the fridge for up to 6 mouths or can it for prolonged storage.

                This is just one way to make hot sauce, a simple base really. You can add whatever flavors you like, such as fruit or liquors. Also you can change the heat level to match your taste by adding more or less peppers, or hotter or milder peppers also. Once you make your own sauce, you will never go back to the store bought ones as they just cannot compare in flavor and variety.

Illustration

        As you walk into the gated garden plot, you are first struck by the sheer size of it. Over seven hundred square feet of pure heaven on earth, filled with a large variety of heirloom vegetables. The next thing that strikes you is all the color that is spread all over, from pink to purple, red to brown, yellow to orange and all the other colors of the rainbow. The immense variety is mind blowing, over sixty different varieties of vegetables. Every kind of vegetable you can think of is planted here; tomatoes, cabbage, carrots, numerous greens, melons, and of course peppers, just to name a couple. The peppers being my babies have the most room in the garden, a four foot by thirty foot raised row that I have packed with plants.

The soil is ripe with organic matter and squirming with all sorts of life forms. The pepper plants bask in the sun till dawn, as the plot has nothing blocking the sun at all. The plants get a south blowing wind making the stems thick and strong, they look like tree trunks because of this. The green branches reach for the sky, heavy with pepper pods. There is one oddity in the row, the Cheiro Roxo pepper plant, which has amazing black foliage (leafs). The plants are spaced one foot apart so they touch some, but this is planned. There is an old wise tale that pepper plants like to hold hands, hands meaning leaves.  There are thirty one plants packed in this part of the garden, with mostly sweet peppers. The good stuff is in the garden in back of the house, where I keep my arsenal of heat.

You step out the back door of the garage and see a field of green and white. It has three four foot by eight foot raised beds, and twenty three five gallon pots. The pots are home made out of old pickle buckets, and are white with a handle. I drilled holes all along the bottom of the bucket for drainage, so the plants would not drown. I made my own potting mix to fill them with made of compost; peat moss, perlite, lime, and my own blended organic fertilizer mix.  All the pots are filled with hot pepper plants, and the other raised beds have various other vegetables such as bok choy, orka, broccil, and beets. All the pots and raised beds in the back rest on a wood chip bed, to help keep out weeds. The raised beds are made out of a brown wood, and are one foot tall. They are filled with a mix of compost, peat moss, grass clippings, and fruit and vegetable waste.  It really is a sea of fire in the gardens, and I could spend days swimming in it.  The joy you get from a simple plant will always amaze me, but it’s the simple things that really count. So dawn has come and the sun is setting, the plants are going down for the night. It is such a peaceful calm in the garden at this time, with the crickets chirping and the fireflies dancing in the sky. I love this place, such a simple thing, a garden.

Description Post

This beast from hell was a raging inferno of a pepper, like none I had ever laid my eyes on. Its name was Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, and it scared me to death. It was the hottest pepper in the world in 2011 according to Guinness World Records, just to give you an idea of how hot this pepper was. The scoville scale is the scale used to measure heat in a pepper, a jalapeno is 3,000-5,000 on the scale, and the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T is 1.4 million! So knowing all of this I did what any sane person would do, grew some Butch T plants.

The plant did not put out a land slide of peppers like some of my other plants did. What it lacked in quantity though, it made up for with scorching hot peppers.  It had a rough texture with small pimples all over it and was fire truck red. It was a little smaller than golf ball and looked like something out of a Sci-Fi movie, almost like a space ship. The top of the pepper was shaped almost like a brain, and the bottom end had a tail that stuck out. A quick wash really made it shine a nice glossy red, it looked so innocent.

As soon as I cut it in half each half started to pool with capsaicin oil, which is what makes peppers hot. This devils spawn of a pepper had so much capsaicin oil; it just oozed it from its walls. The smell was very floral with a hint of citrus at first, with a slight acidic after smell. It had a very surprisingly good taste, almost fruity at first. This lasted all of three seconds, and like a train hitting a car on the tracks, bam! The heat hit me hard and fast, it went from cool to lava hot in those 3 seconds.  No other pepper I have ever tried has burnt me so fast; this thing was on warp speed. It kept climbing in heat like a never ending ladder of pain. Each breath I took felt like I had a blow torch coming out of my mouth.  Twenty minutes later most of the blaze had gone out in my mouth, only a small brush fire here and there.  What a mind bending pepper, it was almost unearthly how hot it was. This pepper has hot sauce written all over it, I can hardly wait to make it into a fiery hot sauce.

A Trinidad scorpion Butch T