Seven Thousand Years of Peppers & Why We Grow So Many.

A Short History of the Pepper | Sweet, Hot & Smoky | Pandemonium Gardens

Every pepper on earth descends from a wild plant that started in the Americas. Archaeologists have pulled pepper remains out of dry caves in Mexico dating back seven to nine thousand years, sitting alongside early maize and squash. Down in Bolivia and the Amazon, other pepper species were domesticated on their own timeline. So the pepper was not one plant that spread. It was several, taken up by different people in different places, long before anyone wrote any of it down. When Columbus reached the Caribbean, the pepper left the hemisphere for the first time and traveled the trade routes into India, China, Hungary, and West Africa. Within a couple of centuries the whole world cooked as though peppers had always been theirs.

That range is exactly what we tried to bottle in The Pepper Sizzler, our end-of-season hot kit. Before we get to it, it helps to understand what makes one pepper sweet and another one dangerous, because it all comes down to a single molecule.

What fascinates us is how much lives inside that one word. Pepper covers a candy-sweet Italian frying variety and a scorpion pepper that will make your eyes water from across the kitchen. The difference is a compound called capsaicin. Sweet peppers carry almost none of it. Hot ones carry a lot. That one molecule is doing all the talking.

Take the sweet end first. Our Jimmy Nardello has no heat at all, just a fruity sweetness that turns buttery the second it hits hot oil. It was saved from disappearing by the Seed Savers Exchange and now sits on the Slow Food Ark of Taste. That is a lot of history for a pepper you can eat whole while standing at the stove.

Move toward heat and the flavor gets more interesting, not just hotter. Aji Amarillo is a Peruvian pepper with a bright, almost tropical fruitiness carrying its warmth. It has been the backbone of Peruvian cooking for centuries, and once you taste it you understand why they never let it go.

Smoke is the third quality, and it usually comes from what happens after the harvest. Ripening a pepper fully and then drying it slowly concentrates the sugars and deepens the flavor into something you can only call smoky. That transformation is the whole idea behind The Sizzler. We build it from the medium and hot peppers coming out of the garden at their peak, so the heat you get is the heat the season actually gave us. Some years lean warmer. Some years lean gentler. The kit tells you the truth about the summer it came from.

For the truly brave, we grow a Chocolate Trinidad Scorpion. It is one of the hottest peppers on the planet, and we grow it mostly because we can. A little goes a very long way, which is the point of putting it in careful hands.

The pepper spent thousands of years becoming this varied. The least we can do is grow enough of it to show you the range.

If your summer runs hot, we can send you proof. The Pepper Sizzler is our late-season kit of medium and hot peppers, picked at their peak and packed with a recipe from Peter to put them to work. Order yours today