7 Chile Facts That Will Liven Up Your Next Dinner Conversation
Chile Peppers are an important element of many of the most fascinating and most delicious dishes on the globe.
From the salsas of Latin America and the jerk meats of the West Indies to the piri piri of Sub-Saharan Africa and the curries of Southeast Asia, chiles bring heat and spice to the world's dishes.
But they are not only amazingly versatile and tasty, they are also quite interesting.
Seven Chile Pepper Facts That Will Liven Up Your Next Dinner Conversation
1 - To begin with it's Chile with an "e." Chili is the South Western Cowboy stew made with meat and beans which they ruin in Cincinnati. The best chili normally includes some chiles.
2 - Chiles are native to the Americas. Despite being a mainstay of the foods of Africa, India and Southeast Asia, peppers were completely unknown in these areas before the sixteenth century. How fast they caught on and fully dominated the recipes of these regions perhaps shows just how fabulous these little flavor packs can be.
3 - At present India is the world's largest producer of chiles. Reread # 2.
4 - The Chile pod is a fruit.
5 - The component which makes many chiles burn the tongue is called capsaicin. The heat amount is gauged by a scale using something known as Scoville Units. It's just a little too confusing to describe exactly how it is determined in this short article but here are a few chiles and their Scoville units to give you a bit of an idea of the range of heat you may encounter:
Peperoncini (these are the yellow-green peppers found on Greek salads as well as in Papa John's Pizza Boxes) - around 200 Scoville Units
Jalapenoes (the slices on nachoes you eat at the ball game) - 1,000 to 5,000 Scoville Units
Thai (found in some Chinese dishes -- you will definitely know if you get one) - 100,000 Scoville Units
Red Savino (these are the world's hottest pepper) - an amazing 500,000 Scoville Units!
Did you catch that? A Red Savino is about 100 to 500 times hotter than the Jalapeno!
6 - There are no poisonous peppers. None. Though a Thai or Red Savino may well make you wish for death.
Incidentally, dairy products (milk, yogurt) are pretty good at helping to cool the heat. Water will not help very much and alcohol will actually make it more intense. The only true cure is time. It will at last fade away.
7 - Chiles are known as "peppers" thanks to a combination of wishful thinking and false advertising.
Early explorers generally were not looking for glory, new lands to conquer or even riches -- they were searching for ways to get spices or herbs, in particular the original "black gold", pepper, to Europe more quickly and inexpensively. Spices built the first fortunes of many cities and even countries along the spice route.
It was this need, a quicker route to the pepper markets of India, that led ol' Chris Columbus to set out sailing west to get east -- where he ran bang into the New World (a fact that he went to his grave not ever knowing, by the way.) He and all the explorers that followed never found the pepper they were searching for (which grows only in India), however they did find chiles. Dried and ground up they became "Jamaican Pepper" in Europe and the label caught on and eventually came to mean not just the spice powder in your kitchen spice rack, but also the fresh pod and the plant itself.
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