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“The History and Evolution of Chili Peppers" September 8, 2010

- Cassie Immel: Hello, everyone. Thank you for watching Wednesday Nite at the Lab tonight. This evening, we have Dr. David Baumler. He's currently a postdoctoral research associate in Professor Nicole T. Perna's Genome Evolution Laboratory here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's received his bachelor's in biochem, his master's in food microbiology and safety, and his PhD in cellular and molecular biology, all from UW-Madison. He joined Dr. Perna's lab in 2006 and has focused on curation analysis and conservation of biochemical pathways and subsystems of microbial genomes. 

He has also worked to extend the use of the genome database to undergraduate educators as a tool for inquiry-based exercises to integrate bio-infomatics throughout the undergrad biology curriculum. So I present to you Dr. Baumler. 
[APPLAUSE]

- David Baumler: Thank you all for coming tonight. So obviously she kind of told you a little bit of the focus of my research which is actually studying bacteria, and I sort of study a group of bacteria that are all related together, such as E. coli and salmonella. Well there's also some members of this very same family that actually cause diseases on plants. So I'm an avid scientist and I always pick up hobbies on the side, and so chili peppers has really been something I picked up on in the last five years. 

But this year, in particular, I've almost taken it to a whole other level where I feel as though I could almost make this research or an entire topic that I give a talk on. And I had a couple friends who suggested this as a perfect kind of outlet to come and share a lot of the knowledge that I've picked up about peppers. And so what I really want to share with you a lot today is how we, in Wisconsin, or myself, could actually grow all those very peppers that you see in front of you on your picture just in our climate. It's quite a mystery. And as you can see just by looking at this picture, and these are all peppers that I just harvested last Saturday, there's quite a diversity in peppers. And I'm going to kind of walk you through a whole lot of the history and the evolution and a lot of the story that I've really read about peppers. So first off, again, so by day I kind of study modeling of bacteria, and of course, I've heard about some scientists that actually run their labs out of their garage. Well, in this case, I took my lab and expanded it on to my driveway as we see there. And we can see there I am with my lab coat, donning it. Fortunately, I have very tolerant neighbors, in fact some even came to see the talk tonight. 

So I'm happy about that, that's a good sign that they're encouraging the hobby. But you can see here I have 100 plants growing in about the space it takes to park two cars in a common household driveway. And so a lot of the pictures are all my very pepper plants that I've been growing this year. So without further ado I'm going to get this story under way. So now all of you have a pepper in your hand. That's actually an entire pepper, that's not just the seed from a pepper, for example. Do not eat it. Here's the moral lesson of the story of peppers: Never eat a pepper that you don't know anything about. 

[LAUGHTER]

 As you'll learn. 

You're going to learn some things about that pepper, and in the end if you decide to eat it, that's your own liability. 

[LAUGHTER]

 So really briefly, the talk outline today is I'm going to go over the origin of peppers in terms of where in the world did peppers really originate or where did they pop up from. And also then, did they kind of pop up all over the world and then spread or did they come from one central region and then spread throughout the world? We'll talk about some of the main species of peppers. I'm not going to get overly scientific but it's part of my own fascination as well is to try to just learn a little more about the peppers that we grow and eat and also the different diversity of them that are out there. I'll talk about hot peppers and hotness and how our bodies actually perceive the compounds that we perceive as very hot when we eat peppers. I'll talk about sweet peppers and also all kinds of different types of peppers. And in the end I'll give you a little bit of my secrets and what I've learned in my research about really being a successful grower of peppers, at least in these northern climates, all right? So first off out there, and this is one for everyone out there, where do chili peppers come from? 

Did they pop up like all over the world maybe like when all the continents were linked together and then eventually they spread? Did they just randomly, sporadically kind of pop up all over the world? Or did they pop up on one continent and then spread across the globe from there? Anyone have any ideas? 

- South America. 

- South America. Anyone else? 

- Central America. 

- Central America, okay. 

- Africa. 

- Africa, all right, that's throwing it out there. What was the one? 

- The Far East. 

- The Far East. Okay, well it depends who you talk to. I have colleagues from the Far East and they claim peppers originated there, they know that they did, they have words in their own language for specific peppers that they know originated there. But actually what I did is I dug into a lot of books because I was kind of confused myself, and originally I thought that maybe they originated in parts of eastern Asia, and then of course part of me said shouldn't they somehow be in the Americas or South America. Whenever we think about peppers we start thinking about going south in the Americas. And so I picked up a lot of books. First of all, that's the thing I want to say too is when you jump into a new subject matter, a lot of people say well I've never had a course in this subject in my life, I just bought the book or read the whole book. 

So these are kind of my colleagues as I'll call them. We have Jean Andrews. She kind of was the first to come out with a very extensive pepper book. And then Paul Bosland and Dave DeWitt. Paul Bosland actually got his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison here. And he actually runs the Chili Pepper Institute down at New Mexico State University. And so basically I've learned a lot of what I did and I figured out all these answers to the puzzling questions by just digging into the depth of all the knowledge that they've basically accumulated on the subject. So where do chili peppers come from? All right, whoever said South America was definitely correct. You get two peppers. 

You can take an extra one home. So what we find here, and this is a little scanned picture of Bolivia right there, but in that black central region, I'm sorry I'll use the pointer right here, in the black central region right here this is kind of known as the heart of the pepper. And this is the area it's believed where the first peppers actually originated. Now they speculate most likely that peppers were even in the Americas before humans were able to cross the Bering Straits and actually come into the Americas well over 12,000 years ago. But in terms of archeological evidence, they actually find evidence of people were actually eating and saving peppers and the seeds and the pods as well as 3,500 to 5,000 years ago in the Americas. So now, how did peppers get out of Bolivia and spread throughout the world and kind of what's the rest of the story behind it? Yeah. 

- Just a real quick question. 

- Sure. 

- What is the evidence that they came from Bolivia? 

- That's a really good question. As we further classify what we'll define as an ancestral pepper versus a domesticated, you can still go to this very area of the world and it's the only place you can find all the different species still growing in the wild. So you can still go and find these very same wild strains actually growing. And it's the only place where they all grow in the same place. So that's where we get the idea from. So how did they spread? Birds. Very interesting relationship that they had co-evolving kind of with birds. And what you'll find is, if you look at the bird there, it's actually not eating a pepper but it's eating berries off of a tree. Now how similar does that look to that little pepper that you guys have in your hands? 

Very similar. So actually the most ancestral or the oldest peppers are very, very small and they're all red. And of course I said to myself I said, how in the world can birds eat these and not die? In fact, birds will eat the entire pepper whole. They'll then germinate it through their stomach and then deposit it with a little bit of additional fertilizer. And then, of course, pepper plants kind of sprout up, and so to a large extent birds have a large to doing with actually spreading peppers. So how can they handle the heat? This is a question I had on my mind in the last year. Well it turns out that mammals have receptors for the compound that we perceive as heat but birds do not. And we'll talk a little more about this. 

So now it finally made sense that to them it's just another red fruit. Peppers all actually maintain a lot of sweetness when they're in the red form. But to them they can eat as many peppers as they want, and they will never perceive that hotness that we as humans or mammals actually will. 

- So are their tongues different or something? 

- No they just don't actually have the receptors for them. Just mammals do. So pretty much peppers are members of a family, of a related family of plants that all originate out of South America called the Solanaceae. And some of the other members here include tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco and nightshade, and, of course, chili peppers. Now here's a few fun facts about peppers. All chili peppers belong to the Capsicum genus. 

So when we scientifically classify things, we'll refer to them as a genus name and we'll give them a second name which we'll call a species name. And this is from the Greek word capto which means to bite, and that's where the Capsicum came from. And we can see there a lot of times I'm going to give the phonetic pronunciation in parentheses just to help everyone out. So Capsicum. So native to Central and South America, originally in Bolivia and now actually currently grown all over the world. In fact, they're grown in almost every single country with the exception of Antarctica. Although there are reports that researchers will grow them there to generate a little spice if they're there studying for three or four months per se. Now here's another little strange fact which some people say but they say well they're called chilies, does that mean they're from Chile? No, actually in that country the word is actually derived from a word which means snow. So it has no relation to it whatsoever. 

And we'll try to learn a little bit more of, okay, where did they get the rest of their name and why are they called peppers? So here's a little bit just a little story about the ancestry of peppers and then kind of how they diverged into the different species. Now everybody here is holding a very ancestral type of pepper, it's in fact one of the more ancestral types that's still out there in the wild, still being spread by birds. And in fact, peppers were also spread then by the natives that lived in the Americas, for example, because they found them desirable to eat. Initially it was something that grew in the wild and they just tolerated it as a food source, and then they started realizing that they liked them and they started growing them more. And they started selecting for different varieties that had desirable traits. But, as we'll see here, and we'll kind of look at the bottom referring to these ancestral peppers down here. Now a couple things that you're going to know about an ancestral pepper is that they're very small. Most of them are all very, very round. They're going to form red at the point of maturity. 

And the other thing that you're going to notice, and maybe you've never seen if you've grown peppers in Wisconsin, is that they all grow straight up. You see those that are all kind of pointing straight up like that? One other interesting fact is that you notice how all the peppers that you have nobody has a stem attached to it anymore. So the real ancestral type of peppers have a very, once they become in that mature stage they practically can fall right off in the wind or a bird can eat them very quickly. And that way also is another encouraging trait for peppers to spread. Now, over time, the very ancestral types kind of diverged into different species of peppers. And there's probably, people argue about this and they've been doing it for hundreds of years, but there's probably about 25 species of peppers recognized today, taxonomically, but really there's only about five that are actually grown domestically. And in fact, in my pepper garden we basically have representatives of these five species right here. Which have all, as we believed, kind of diverged from the same ancestral heart, etc. Yeah? 

- I was just curious, how did a pepper from China with its scientific name get the common name which means that it would be from Havana? 

- That's a very good point. In fact, we'll talk about that species first just because you honed right in on it. So the species there was referred to, and it was called by a Dutch taxonomist about 300 years ago. He gave it the name chinense, which means literally from China because he believed that those types, the hottest ones in the world, were all originated from this area of Asia and from China actually, which is actually incorrect. And so a classic representative of that one is going to be the habaneros which actually means from Havana or from Cuba. And we'll talk a little bit more of like how that type of pepper actually then made it all the way to China in a couple slides. Another common type is called Capsicum frutescens. And so the most common variety of this is Tabasco. Everybody's probably heard of Tabasco sauce, it's the most popular hot sauce in the world. 

Really, the meaning of this type of species actually means shrubby or bushy. And what you pretty much find is that there aren't a whole lot of areas around the world where they grow this species, and pretty much the most commonly known one is going to be Tabasco. Some of these identification books will have a couple other ones to them. But primarily that's the one that you'll find of that species grown. And so someone actually, there was a war in that region of Mexico, in Tabasco, Mexico, and soldiers brought seeds back to New Orleans and that's where this person decided to start growing 700-acre plantations of Tabasco peppers and started bottling his own hot sauce back in the 1800s which then trademarked as what we know as Tabasco hot sauce today. So the next species, which is Capsicum annuum, which actually means annual which is also incorrect, they aren't annuals, they're actually perennials. At some point somebody said there were two types of species and some are annuals and some are perennials. The only difference there depends how cold your climate is. If it freezes, they're annuals, and if you're in warm climates, they're going to be perennials. That's the more common variety if you go down to New Mexico, if you go down to Mexico. 

These are the type of peppers that probably almost dominate our grocery markets and what you'll see more commonly in the United States. Now some peppers can actually grow as perennials, and in fact in some climates they've been known to grow for over 15 years and some have reported that they can get to be 20-foot large bushes. Typically, though, if you grow peppers year after year, in our climate you have to over winter them, and I've only done that for one winter, but you do see the actual pepper production actually goes up for the first maybe five years or so from what I've read, and then it kind of tapers off. So it's not something that you grow for the rest of your life and just keep harvesting peppers. You'd probably start another one. So let's get to the next species which is going to be called Capsicum baccatum, which means berry like. Now this is a variety I only got into just recently, but commonly we refer to them as ajis, this AJI right there, which is a common term that a lot of people in South America referred to these chilies as. They just refer to them as ajis. Now one of the common ones there is this very yellow variety, and some people have seen it and we've given it a more Americanized name called lemon drop pepper. Has anyone ever heard of that one before? 

A couple people. It's a really fun one because I don't know about you but when you go to the grocery store I've never seen peppers that look like that, that are bright yellow. And they're really kind of fun, and they have a great kind of lemony citrusy flavor to them. So that's why I think they picked up the lemon name. But those are a very neat one, in fact I have a couple different ajis in my collection, but really, with the exception of a couple of those types, we don't see them grown that much in North America so much. Now the last species I'm going to talk about on there is a species pubescens which means hairy. And I actually have one of those plants right in front of you up here. So I invite you after the talk to come up and actually see and feel the leaves because all of them actually have hairs all over them. So that's another trait to just kind of recognize that type of pepper. Now originally people thought that these particular species of peppers could only grow at very high elevations in the mountains in the Andes. 

But obviously we're showing we can grow them practically close to sea level right here in Wisconsin. Now how did these different types of species spread? And now this is going to be a little more the story of how did they kind of get where they are and why did certain types dominate certain regions. Now, what you're going to see here is that the annuum variety, remember we talked about those are going to contain your bell pepper and a lot of those varieties, all these originated in that central heart in Bolivia remember, and then via natives and then birds, basically they kind of really spread out into Central America and then all the way up through Mexico. And you can see a little bit looks like made it into the Caribbean here slightly. Here we can see the pubescens strain. And in fact another characteristic trait of this is that they have purple flowers. So most pepper plants that you'll grow are going to have white flowers, as you'll see classic white flowers here, a little bit darker white flower here, but here's the purple flowers and, in fact, they're all closed up because they close up when the sun goes down, but you can actually come up and see the purple flowers on that species of plant. Another really unique trait of this particular type of pepper is if you actually cut the pepper open, and there's one on there that looks like a green apple, and if we cut it open, the seeds are completely black. Most other peppers all have a white seed to them. 

So the first time I was given one of these and someone said you should really try growing this type of pepper, I cut it open and I thought it was rotten. But just another characteristic trait of that particular species. And as we can see right here, they basically spread along the Andes Mountains. This kind of darker region is where they're pretty much found today. Now here we can get into the baccatum species, and we can see that this one, which contains those ajis or that bright yellow one that I talked about, really just kind of spread a little more west and east through South America down there. So, again, unless you're really seeking out unique types of peppers we just haven't seen these really climb up into North America. Now the last species I'll talk about is the one that contains all the real hottest varieties and this is the chinense. And as you can see here, the very unique factor here is it went all the way as far east into Brazil but then also all over the Caribbean Islands right here. And so many of you maybe have heard of different types of Caribbean varieties that have popped up that are very hot. And in fact, it's very well known that a lot of the islands in the Caribbean have very unique distinct hot peppers to each island. 

A couple people came in and were throwing some names out for example. But this is just showing a little bit of how those actually spread and made it across the land into the all the different islands. Okay, so here's a little break down of the anatomy of a pepper and then also the anatomy of the flowers. So as we can see, here's a pepper kind of cut through the cross-section. We've got the stem on top of it, otherwise referred to as the penducle. We've got the calyx which kind of surrounds the attachment point where the penducle comes into the pepper there. And then we have the parts of the skin, which they refer to as the exocarp, mesocarp and endocarp. The placenta. We've got the apex, which is the end of the pepper. The seeds. 

And, of course, the shoulder of the pepper. And now everybody asks me, they said where is the heat in a pepper? Can anyone tell me that? 

- The seeds. 

- The seeds. Not correct. 

- The placenta. 

- The placenta, that's exactly right. But you're close when you say the seeds because the placenta is what holds the seeds. So maybe you've gotten dried peppers and everyone says remove the seeds, remove the heat. 

Well, yeah, the membrane actually dries all over those seeds, and also in the process of removing seeds, you're actually removing this very placenta and that's why they say use extreme caution when deseeding peppers. But most cookbooks will never say remove the placenta. They'll say deseed the peppers and move on. Now here we've got the flowers of the peppers. And so we're just going to show you that they have petals on them and we've got the stigma, for example, which is the female part of the organ coming out the top right here. And in fact, peppers are actually asexual, they can self-pollinate themselves, or most species can of peppers. And in fact, surrounding it there in the pistils, there we go, in the actual sometimes referred to as the antlers, or otherwise the stamen, that's where the pollen is, and so basically you need those pollen particles to make it to the tip of the female part of the organ. And then right at the base there, which is right down here, is where the pepper is actually going to start to form. So if it's actually pollinated, you'll start to see a pepper being produced and growing right out of that region right there. And then the top picture right here is just showing a little example of someone actually trying to make sure that they're making their own pollinated flower of a pepper plant. 

So they actually remove all those ones, the antlers that actually hold all the pollen so that they know that they're actually only giving it the one type that they wanted. So other physical differences of peppers. Obviously we can look at the 73 varieties that I grow in front of you today, and they're classified based on different shapes, whether or not they're long or whether or not they're actually completely round, whether or not they come to a point at the end of them. If you hold them this way, if their cross-sections are kind of smooth or if they actually have ripples or divots in them. Different types of calyx shapes, so that's going to be the shape that actually that penducle attaches. And in fact, you can see that better if you come up at the end of the talk and you really take a look at all those different, how those stems actually attach to the peppers. The penducle position, basically whether or not its kind of dipped into the pepper or if it's on the top part. And then also the fruit shape at the penducle. So these are just a number of characteristics that taxonomists kind of used historically over the last few hundred years to describe different types of peppers and whether or not they thought it was actually a very unique type of species. So some other physical differences of peppers. 

Here I'm just going to talk about the different colors of them really. Because that, to me, is one of the very fascinating things. So right here in this picture right here is one of each of my type habaneros, again it's that really spicy, the chinense species. And we can see we have a type here that goes all the way from completely white, to getting peach, to kind of more oranger tones, all the way into red tones. We even have yellow ones. This one is kind of a little between yellow and brown. And then this one is actually chocolate brown in color. It looks a little more even black right here, but if you come up later you can actually pinpoint that one out. Now what's unique is somebody actually, usually all these peppers are very hot. And typically that deters a lot of people from actually having tried an habanero. 

How many people have never tried a habanero pepper because they thought they were too hot? Yeah, a good portion of us out there. Only until a couple of years did I. Now oddly enough, there's two types in there that at the Chili Pepper Institute that they've actually developed so they almost contain little to no heat. And in fact, the ones that contain little or no heat would be this one right here and this one right here. And in fact, they'll be less heat inside of those than a jalapeno that you buy at your grocery store. So here's, for example, a variety you might want to seek out and grow yourself if you've never been able to actually experience the flavor of a habanero pepper. A lot of peppers actually will come in starting green, they'll then change colors throughout the maturation process. They'll change into yellows and oranges, all the way to reds, some will finish in very dark tones. And what I have down here are a couple of the real fun ones. 

This is one that comes in initially kind of purple and then turns to white and then it turns to yellow and then to orange and then to red. And it's called a five color marble or an ornamental pepper. Here's a variety right here where they initially come in very purple and then change to a greener color and then to a red. And that's actually the plant right in front of you right there. The purple plant. There's another interesting characteristic is that all the foliage of that plant is actually purple. It really stands out when you see a hundred of them in front of you, there's only a couple that are entirely purple. This is one right here where they actually initially come in dark purple. They then turn to green and then they change to orange. Now, some of these ones where they start as purple and then they change to other colors are odd to me because traditionally peppers get hotter when they go from green to their final color. 

But these actually are hottest when they're purple and then supposedly they become more calmer as they change colors. So just a little fun but there's almost every shape under the sun of peppers. So what is with the name? I keep referring to these kind of as peppers and then we refer to them as chili peppers. But notice that the name for the plant in the original areas was not peppers but it was actually known as chilies. So why does this crop, which has this geography in South America, get such a name change and now we always have to refer to them as chili peppers or bell peppers and jalapeno peppers? Well, pepper, actually as in peppercorns, the original pepper, botanically is referred to as the genus piper and then nigrum, I think. And pepper is a word that comes from the Sanskrit word pippali, which refers to the berry, became peppery in Greek and then later piper in Latin. And as we can see over there, this is, I guess, a pepper pod growing on a tree and this is some that is being dried and crushed here. Well, chili peppers have absolutely no relation to black peppers actually. 

Someone gave it the wrong designation, and that name has stuck ever since. So bell peppers. Okay. Well, everybody knows the story about Christopher Columbus, right? Trying to find a new route to get spices in the Orients. And set out to India in 1492. He ended up kind of finding a different area around the Caribbean Islands, and what he found is that the locals there actually had all these types of ajis, or chilies, that they were eating. And in fact, he has a quote down here which someone pulled from his memoirs and translated which meant the natives had plenty of aji, which is their pepper which is more valuable than black pepper, and all the people eat nothing else. It is being very wholesome. Now back in this day if he were able to make it all the way to India and come back to Europe, for example, with a whole arm full of spices you basically had enough wealth for the rest of your life. 

So obviously, he brought these chili peppers and these seeds back to Portugal and Spain, and of course he told the king that he brought a new type of pepper with him. And the Europeans really liked this new pepper. More importantly, as everyone knows here, how many seeds are inside of a pepper when you cut them open? Depending on the type but it's maybe hundreds. Maybe ten to hundreds. And we know they can almost grow now in almost any climate on our planet. So very quickly within 100 years, once Columbus brought these seeds back into Europe, within 100 years via all the different shipping routes, peppers spread throughout the entire world. Prior to like air travel I don't think any other type of actual plant had been spread in that kind of ferocity, but people really liked it for a number of reasons. It was easy to grow. Now the very poor people could grow and eat like they were wealthy, they could spice up their foods. 

And obviously you were able to generate a lot of seed, and you could then share it and grow it. And from there they spread throughout the worlds and then for centuries people kept propagating it, selecting for random mutations that arose, selecting for some of these desirable traits. So basically thanks to Columbus, unfortunately, for a little bit of confusion about this. So sweet peppers. So let's see, here we have a couple of my types that are in the collection. We have bell peppers, pimento peppers, in fact some of these very sweet ones are used for their color. And, in fact, the pimentos that you see in green Olives are actually from one of these pepper varieties that is you see in the picture right there. A lot of times also they were commonly used dried up and used to make paprika, another type of spice. So basically one thing that you notice that's different with a lot of these types of fruit versus that little ancestral pepper in your hand is that peppers got a lot bigger, didn't they? So as people started growing peppers, remember we talked about what these ancestral traits were, a couple which that they grew up, they fell off that penducle very easily and that they were very small and they were very hot. 

Well over time, people selected for random mutating varieties that popped up for a couple of factors. One, they wanted peppers that started to grow downward. Why? So that birds couldn't see them anymore. The peppers would actually hide underneath the foliage, and this way they could protect a little more of their food stores that they were trying to actually grow. Another thing that you'll see is that all of these actually have their stem or their penducle attached to them. So people selected for naturally occurring mutating varieties that had a very strong attachment to the plant so that they wouldn't fall off during storms or heavy wind, again trying to protect your crop if you're actually growing and domesticating these types of peppers. So basically then also I think what you'll find is that people then selected for larger fruit. So a lot of these sweet varieties today, I don't even think one exists where you can grow sweet peppers that are as small as that little one that you find in your hand. I don't think anyone actually selected that type of characteristic. 

But we see the different types of fruit, large, and they contain no heat, and many turn red when they're actually ripe. But, of course, there's other types out there, and you go to your grocery story and you can you see all the different colors of bell peppers that are out there. Yellow, orange, purplish, some even go a little bit kind of blacker in color when they're mature. 

- Isn't paprika just the Hungarian word for pepper? 

- I think they were one of the areas that started really producing paprika so I think it does have some heart maybe within that region. But then people started producing paprika actually in the United States as well once they brought some of these very red varieties back, in fact. Very good question. So here's a couple quick nutritional benefits of chilies. They're extremely nutritional to the human body. They're cholesterol free and low in sodium and calories. 

They're also very rich in vitamins. In fact, an average bell pepper contains five times more Vitamin C than an orange. Very interesting. Also a very good source of folic acid, potassium, and also vitamin E. So the hotness of pepper. How do we actually perceive this spice or why does it give us a little bit of burn? Well, there's compounds that are called capsinoids that are found in peppers. And there's actually about maybe I think five different compounds that our body will perceive as hot but there's primarily two. One's called capsaicin and the other is called dihydrocapsaicin, and we kind of have a little chemical structure of those two right here. But, basically, if you ever get this on you, and unfortunately if you ever have you'll find with the very hot pepper if you didn't wear gloves, which I recommend if you do deal with peppers to wear gloves, you'll find that that can stay on your skin and underneath your fingernails for at least three or four days. 

And it can end up in the wrong places and it's not a very pleasant experience. So if you do happen to not wear gloves and you get capsaicin on your hands, in the books a lot of people say that just by default people found that if you put them in a dilute bleach solution it seemed to deactivate the capsaicin compound. But the other solution is that capsaicin only dissolves in oils and alcohols. So basically if you eat a real hot pepper people say drink a ton of cold water or drink Coca-Cola. Everybody's got their own remedy, but that's not going to do anything. That won't absolutely do anything for you. Basically, what you want to do is eat dairy foods because the casein molecules that are actually in dairy products will actually help to bind those receptors and prevent capsaicin from further binding the receptors in your mouth. So usually, a lot of times when people have something hot and they serve it with sour cream, with chili for example, yogurts with curries but now whenever I'm kind of testing a couple new hot types of pepper, I'll pull out a glass of milk actually. Another technique that I just read recently is if you do get pepper on your hands, you can actually rub it off with rubbing alcohol. Again because those are going to be dissolvable in alcohol. 

And if you get it in your eyes, I would recommend that you wear eye protection if you're really cutting the craziest peppers in the world and stuff like that, but just flush it out with water, there's no real quick fix to doing that. And unfortunately, I've kind of dealt with a number of these different methods of pain. That's a good thing. So some are hotter. So how do we actually classify how hot peppers are? That's a very good question because if you look at the 73 in front of you today there's no way to tell which are the hottest. And so there was actually a pharmacist in 1912 by the name of Wilbur Scoville who developed a method for kind of measuring the heat or the hotness in chili peppers. And he refers to them as Scoville units, and they're measured in multiples of a hundred with the bell pepper starting out at a level of zero. Well then basically what you do is you take these chili peppers and you weigh out a certain known amount of them and you then do dilutions in water. So say you dilute it to a one in a hundred or one in a thousand parts of this water with a little bit of sugar in it. 

Well, once you have these dilutions made of a pepper, you actually have a panel of five people taste them, and they try to figure out like at what point do we not perceive heat anymore. So say, for example, we diluted a pepper one to a thousand, and when we tasted that one to a thousand dilution we say no I don't taste any pepper anymore, this tastes more like a bell pepper. Then you say this has a Scoville rating of a thousand. So basically that number is kind of based on how much of the dilution that the chili is going to need before none of this heat is detected. So what kind of range are we looking at? Well, if you looked in the early books they'll talk about this range goes from zero maybe up to about 300,000-400,000. Which means you'd have to dilute some of these peppers by that much parts in water to actually not perceive the heat anymore. Well nowadays there's actually more accurate ways to actually monitor a test for the amount of heat that's in these peppers. So we talked about those different compounds, the capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin for example. And there's actually a method called high performance liquid chromatography which actually you can very well detect those two compounds and know exactly the levels that are in them. 

But ironically enough everybody still converts them over to Scoville units just because everybody just has this as it's a base unit that we've been using. So this one is very specialized, very replicable test because obviously if you have a panel of five people tasting a whole bunch of series of chili peppers, their taste buds can get burned out. You can't just come in and say all right can I get five people from the audience, we're going to characterize these 73 types today. It's not as scientifically sound. But that's just the way that it's been done in the chili pepper realm. Okay, so a little bit more about capsaicin, the hotter than the hot. So a single drop of capsaicin diluted in a hundred thousand drops of water will actually blister the human tongue. Now just to give this an example. So pure capsaicin and you won't find that actually in a pepper, people can synthesize it or you can actually purify it to its complete crystalline form. And at the bottom here is a company that sells a crystal of capsaicin, for example. 

What you'll find is that the hottest level that this crystal will actually register is 16 million Scoville units. Now of course, I wanted to figure this out because I'm like what is even the theoretical possible hottest pepper that could be out there. So if somehow a pepper can form similar to a crystalline form of the compound, it might crack about 16 million Scoville units. Just to give you a couple of ideas of what we'll refer to as the spiciness or the bite of capsaicin, it's 70 times hotter than pepperine, the chief component in black pepper, and it's a thousand times hotter than zingerone which is the spicy ingredient in ginger. So we talked a little bit here about kind of safety with peppers, about how they're barely soluble in water but they're also extremely soluble in oils and alcohols. So here's just a little bit of a range, kind of giving you an idea of breaking down really where do the peppers that I grow and the peppers in the world fall in terms of these scales. And we'll see we're going to be somewhere from about a zero to greater than a million per se. And you can see here's just a couple on somewhat of a scale, sweet, bell, pimento, jalapeno, cyrano, Tabasco, and then we start to get into these ones. Here's an orange habanero maybe people have heard about kind of in the hundreds of thousands realm. Now starting with the sweet pepper, so typically we'll classify these as ones that range from zero to a thousand Scoville units or Scoville heat units. 

These will include different types of bell peppers, pimento peppers we talked about. Different types of sweet bananas. So these are some of my homemade sweet canned banana peppers. And these are pepperoncinis. Now just to give you some idea of some compounds maybe in your very kitchen, so you might go home and taste them and relate them to what Scovilles they are. Well the paprika that we buy in the United States is pretty much no spice or heat in it, and it's going to have a Scoville of zero. Pickled pepperoncini, if you pick some up in your grocery store, is going to be somewhere from about ten to a hundred. Chili powder that you'll have in your spice cabinet is actually going to be somewhere around 500 to a thousand, just to put it into perspective. Now we'll call these the mild varieties but more from 1,000 to 3,000 Scoville heat units. These include ancho, poblano stuffing peppers, Bermuda hot peppers and also Spanish hot paprika. 

They actually make different types of hot paprika, you just have to seek it outside of our country. Here's a seasoning many of you maybe have or have heard of but old bay seasoning used in a lot of traditional seafood boils and crab boils, that kind of stuff. It ends up boiling the red potatoes even redder and all this kind of stuff. But that is basically a Scoville rating of about 1,000 to 1,500 to kind of put it into perspective for you. Let's see, we have medium range spicy peppers which go from 3,000 to 6,000 Scoville units. And here's a couple varieties in my collection. One's called pinata, it's kind of similar to jalapenos, it just changes a couple of different colors. We've got hot banana peppers, and then this is a commercially available made in Louisiana hot sauce which is going to be somewhere around this Scoville heat range. So now we're getting into hot peppers which are going to range from 6,000 to 80,000 Scoville heat units. And these will include types that probably some of you have heard of like cayenne and Tabasco. 

We've got cyrano peppers. And here, for example, if you just buy your normal Tabasco sauce that you've probably seen many times in your life, you'll see that the Scoville numbers on those is going to be about 2,500 to 5,000. So now we're getting into the very hot peppers. And this is where we're starting to get about 80,000 to 500,000 Scoville units. Now, you'll see here that one of the varieties included is called chili tepine which is one of the most ancestral peppers. In fact, that's the variety that everybody has in your hand. So, fortunately, I don't think anybody actually ate that yet, did they? 

[LAUGHTER]

 I ate one this morning, I got to admit I've only made sauce with them, I've never eaten one whole. And I ate one this morning, and I actually had to grab a little milk and I started sweating and it lasted for a little bit. 

They're definitely at the heat level of a habanero, which you almost can't believe when you look at how small that pepper is but wow it packs the heat in there. But we've got different types of habaneros. That different species with the hairs, those are actually very spicy. They're going to be in this level. A lot of the different types of Asian or Thai chili pepper varieties are going to be in this level. And there's also many, many more. And this is a relative to habanero, for example, that is called cajamarca, and in Spanish, my friend told me, translated it actually means the kick of the horse. 

[LAUGHTER]

 So just to give you an idea if pepper has a name that means the kick of a horse, you can kind of go out on a limb and say it's probably going to be hot if you bite into it. So now this is where you guys come in. 

What is the hottest pepper currently known in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records, and how many could one person eat in two minutes? 

[INAUDIBLE]

 We got a couple out there. 

[INAUDIBLE]

- Okay. 

[INAUDIBLE]

- Yep. Jolokia or otherwise known as the ghost pepper. 

We got a couple that already got it out there. How many can a person eat in two minutes? 

- None. 

- None? Well they set a Guinness Book record so they must have eaten more than one probably. Throw a number out there. 

- Seven. 

- Five. 

- Okay, seven, five, all right. Well we have a house wife from India who set a Guinness World Record by eating 51 ghost peppers in less than two minutes. 

- Did she chew or did she just like swallow? 

- You can actually go I think and find it online on YouTube. And you might ask yourself, how does one celebrate from such a hallmark event? She then proceeds, and I've seen this video because it captured the news headlines, I'm like oh, my gosh, world record eating this, she takes the ghost peppers and proceeds to rub them in her eyes as a celebration. I don't quite get it. Of course, the other gentlemen in the audience said that the peppers are referred to as jolokia, which is true. They're called bhut jolokia, otherwise known as naga jolokia as well. But the western media, we kind of dub them ghost peppers basically. And in fact the pepper plant on the end there is actually a ghost pepper plant right in front of you. So have you been feeling any heat there, sir? 

[LAUGHTER]

- A little bit. 

- Well as we can see here based on my little newborn girl, who's actually in the back of the auditorium, they're hot enough to make a newborn cry from three feet away. 

[LAUGHTER]

 Actually she wasn't crying from the peppers, she was just tired of looking at peppers with her daddy. But these are the different types that I grow. We have a couple types, the naga and the bhut jolokia, and some of have actually been selected to produce a little larger fruit. So this is just showing a little bit of the different sizes of the fruit right here. But these have been registered over a million Scoville heat units. 

Almost about 1100, I think, basically. And it was very verified and it was double replicated and scientifically shown. So that is currently the world record holder of peppers, the hottest in the world. Yes? 

- So a pepper that hot, would it really be used in cooking at all? 

- You wouldn't need much of it, would you? 

- No. 

- You know, I have to be quite frank I've eaten almost every pepper that's on that plate in front of you, but I've still not eaten a ghost pepper. I've made sauces with them and tried them. I've made a one to four diluted strength or a one and a half. 

But this year I will do it. 

[LAUGHTER]

 One thing I do recommend though is that if you're going to start biting into a hot pepper, start at that end where there's no seeds and there's no placenta, away from the stem and the penducle. Start your first little nibble on the end where you see the little point. And just say to yourself, if I can survive this it's going to get at least ten times hotter as I keep going up. Okay? All right, so a little bit more about capsinoids and how they actually affect us. So wrapped around the taste buds in our tongues are actually sets of neurons that relay the information about temperature and pain to our brains. And so when these capsaicin molecules actually interact with these neurons a message is sent to the brain saying that something hot or painful is actually being sensed. The same is true for some other types of molecules that you'll find in food such as like menthol and peppermint. 

In fact, the brain receives a message of either cold or pain. And essentially, the brain is kind of being tricked into thinking that pain is being felt when really there is no pain or damage occurring, but some people might attest otherwise. But typically your body reacts by actually producing endorphins. And so some people describe somewhat of a rush from eating really hot, hot food or chili peppers and this kind of thing. And so this is just a little bit of what's actually going on in our bodies when we eat these really hot peppers. Yeah? 

- What do you think is the reason that that evolved, that response? If no damage is being done, why does our brain perceive this as if our tongue is blistering? 

- Could you repeat the question? 

- The question was he said why basically did we evolve with these receptors for this compound to cause pain? 

I'm not sure if it was a planned evolution or if it was just kind of secondary and it happened. 

- I've heard an answer to that. That it's actually a defense against mammals eating them, and birds actually don't sense the pain and they also don't digest the seeds so they can disperse the seeds. 

- Yep. 

[INAUDIBLE]

- That sounds pretty much accurate. Yeah? 

- I heard you say earlier that the tongue was blistered by some of these peppers? 

- That was the pure crystalline capsaicin compound. 

Right. But, no, the comment in the back, thank you, very good, is definitely true that peppers did have this compound which did deter mammals from eating it. In fact, if you go and you buy spray, I've seen them sold on television, bear deterrent, it's actually pepper spray. In fact, there's ones for, I think, deterring moose. And, in fact, I've read in parts of India people rub the ghost peppers on their walls to keep elephants away. And so, as I tell my wife, I said ever since we've been growing all these chilies, I haven't seen an elephant, I haven't seen a bear or a moose. So they must be working. 

[LAUGHTER]

 Yes? 

- I have noticed when I judge hot food that the hotness will formulate in certain parts of your mouth. 

- Okay. 

- Have you made a study on what parts are affected by what peppers? 

- Okay. The question was he's noticed different hot forms different sensations or different levels of hotness in different parts of the mouth. I have not designed a study to do that, but that's a very interesting question. If maybe like they're actually slightly different. I don't actually know if they're different. 

- I noticed that jalapenos will hit the first part of the mouth. 

- Okay. 

- Habaneros in the back. 

And there's a pepper out of China that spreads all over. 

- Okay. 

- And I'm trying to learn more about that through judging. 

- Okay. I think, I've sensed the same thing with the habanero. And I think what it is, remember we talked about a couple different types of capsinoids compounds. There's capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin. Some of these peppers, those compounds will actually give a different sense of heat maybe in different parts of our palate. So maybe one of these types of peppers actually have different levels of these different capsinoids, for example. That would probably be where I would start researching it. 

Very good question though. Yes, question? 

- What is the process by which you adapt to the heat and pain of peppers? 

- Okay, the question was what is the process of adapting yourself to the heat or pain of peppers? I think I can attest in saying that over the last two years my tolerance or my craving for hot, hot peppers has increased. Now I'm trying to figure out is it maybe I'm starting to burn out my receptors or taste buds or is it that I can just tolerate it more physically and it's become more enjoyable. I'm not quite sure. I think there's a lot of factors involved with that actually. So good question. Yes, one more question. 

- The compounds, the capsaicin compounds, do they actually cause damage or is the body just fooled to think that they are? And I ask that because if the birds don't have receptors for those compounds, that wouldn't necessarily mean that the compound isn't affecting their body as it goes through. 

- Very good question. The question was whether or not are there different ways that our bodies are affected by the compounds or the capsinoids, and do birds actually still get affected perhaps. Now I think one part of that is that they swallow the pepper whole. So maybe if they chewed it up I think by the time it got to your stomach you would feel some sensations because it does promote an excretion of gastric juices, for example, and you're going to get a little upset tummy, for example. So I think if birds maybe chewed them up or ate ones that were broken maybe they might get a little bit. Another factor is that they might have a slower amount of time that that food sits in their stomachs in terms of the passage time from eat to all the way towards bird droppings. So it might be a very quick passage time in which it's just not that painful to them. So growing your own peppers in Wisconsin. 

So this is a little bit of what I've kind of been toying around with myself is figuring out how to grow better peppers. And so what I've learned is you really want to start seeds very early in the spring, and in fact the hotter variety of peppers require a longer time to germinate seeds. Some take up to all the way up from three weeks to maybe five weeks to germinate. So start those habaneros and the real hot types in the end of February, early March. You're also going to want to keep those seedlings underneath some kind of an indoor lighting and then with some type of, you try to keep them above 75 degrees Fahrenheit. So typically you have to use some type of a heating mat, something along these lines. Basically, in our climate, we want to wait until the outdoor temperatures are going to be sufficient to not stress the pepper plants because pepper plants really don't like our cold winters and our kind of fickle spring and fall seasons that we kind of have. And so you'll see, I recommend, and a lot of the books will say too, is you put them outdoors when the day time temps tend to go above 70 degrees Fahrenheit and when your nighttime temps are pretty much above 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Now I know exactly because I told everyone when to plant their peppers outdoors this year, but that weekend right before the three-day weekend in May it suddenly jumped up to like every day was in the 80s, every night was now in the 60s. Everybody kind of remembers because we're like this is Wisconsin, it was great weather. 

Now, a lot of people are too eager. Even if it's Mother's Day everybody starts getting very eager to start planting outdoors in Wisconsin. Now, the worst thing you can do to a pepper is to put it in the ground when it's too cold. It'll stress it and that plant, it won't die but it will just never grow and will never get any bigger. So just be patient even if you have to wait until the first week of June is usually when, if you look at Wisconsin Gardener's Guide, for example, they'll recommend peppers planting actually the first week of June. But if it gets a little warmer a week and a half or two earlier like it did this year, you can go for it. Pepper plants pretty much like partial shade to full sun. We don't really crack the 100-degree temps because peppers can actually get burned out in the scorching sun. In fact, this species with the hairs that nobody has had much success growing it down in New Mexico because they just get completely burned out and they scorch it out. In fact, they have to grow them underneath shade shelters or something along these lines to try it. 

What I found is I actually grow mine in a soil-less medium, and I actually give them a full nutrient makeup of formulated ratios of organic nutrients that I came up with. And so you basically want to fertilize your plants every one to two weeks and also water them during dry spells. Now the biggest thing that I saw that what was really interesting and stuck me here is that the main three nutrients when we start thinking about plants, what they really need in terms of what we're feeding them in their fertilizers are going to be nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Now what you'll see here is oddly enough it looks as though peppers require an enormously, well to me it seems strange, a larger amount of calcium than I had ever anticipated in terms of some of the other main nutrients. Now, I didn't think anything of this and then I read about in some of the other books they talked about the hotter varieties really need more calcium. And I said, huh. So here, for example, is a habanero plant, and you kind of see how these leaves have these kind of wrinkled appearance to them. Now every time I grew habaneros I just thought that's how they look when you grow them in Wisconsin. It just seemed intuitive to me. Then I read that's actually a sign the plant is starved of calcium. 

Give them a smooth dose of calcium, and you'll then see that the leaves will completely smooth out. And so here you'll see my habaneros grow in summer. Notice how they're completely almost smoothed out leaves. And you'll actually see about three or four times as much fruit being produced. So that's one of my big take home secrets right there. You definitely want to fertilize your plants or you're not going to get many fruit produced, and also then calcium is kind of one of those things that really stands out. Now harvest time. What do you actually do with all these peppers? That seems like the common story. Everybody says, what are you going to do with all these peppers, Dave? 

Well, I've also been doing a little bit of research with some of my friends and scientists over at a gardening center on the east side called Paradigm Gardens. And so I hosted a workshop there last spring where we actually did a plant sale, and I kind of gave a similar talk. And so I'm actually going to be showing a lot of what I do with cooking peppers at a second workshop actually a week from Saturday. And so these are some of the examples of how I like to cook with peppers. You can take peppers and you can dry them, and you can use them then as a powder or grind them up. Buy yourself a coffee grinder, but don't use it for your morning coffee. But take those dried peppers and you can grind it into a complete powder and you can use it as a seasoning from there. But what I actually like to do is actually throw them in a Ziploc bag and throw them in a freezer. Now why is this? Well, when you dry a pepper you lose a lot of the actual flavors of it. 

Now the heat, or the capsaicin, nothing's going to be broken down there. The heat is going to be retained. But say, for example, you take some of these peppers, which I'm starting to learn have more apricot or green apple flavors to them or raisiny flavors or kind of melony flavors to them, which they actually do, if you dry them you'll lose all those kind of characteristic flavors, and all you'll save is the hot behind it. But if you freeze them, they actually still maintain a lot their texture and you pull them out of the freezer bag and make yourself a nice hot salsa or something like that in the middle of winter here. So I've also kind of experimented with making types of hot sauces and actually different types of salsas, in some countries they refer to them as chutneys. You can make a lot of different types of pepper infused vinegars. A lot of this people really like to do just for ornamental stuff in their kitchens actually. We found different recipes where you make an orange zest pepper butter to spread on bread which is fantastic. I've started to experiment with kind of sweet and hot so I've been making different types of cookie recipes, and I'm actually going to maybe try to make a type of ice cream with hot peppers in it. But we also have here an experiment where I actually made candied peppers. 

It's a process where you actually pull the water out and you replace it with real high sugar concentration over time. So you actually make candied peppers. They're quite fun. You can bake it into different types of breads. And of course I'm also and avid home-brewer, and so I made a habanero lime pale ale recently. So I actually made a very spicy beer. I actually kind of liked it. So if anyone is interested and you actually want to learn a little more about actually preserving, canning and cooking peppers, I'm going to be hosting a pepper workshop over at Paradigm Gardens on Saturday, September 18th. Some of the topics we're going to cover are canning, drying, safe methods of canning and drying. I actually got my master's degree here in food microbiology and safety. 

So I do have some background in also making sure we're not going to kill anybody with clostridium Botulism or anything. 

[LAUGHTER]

 But making different types of sauces and salsas. We're also going to have a pepper trade I think. And then also a lot of the guys at the science staff at Paradigm, they've been playing around and experimenting actually in the last six months about different way to figure out how to grow peppers year-round in Wisconsin. So they're going to be showing a number of different indoor lighting mechanisms and hydroponic gardening mechanisms and even aeroponic methods. They're really kind of ahead of the game. One of the more progressive gardening centers in the Midwest. And over here we have a big pile of all my canning stuff so we'll have a lot of food and appetizers to taste and stuff like that. So after the talk if anybody wants to learn a little more, I have little flyers on that information. 

And of course, I encourage you to come up after the talk, ask me any questions you have, take a look at the varieties, 73 types of peppers, and also come up and feel the hairy or the species pubescens on this pepper variety. And if you want to eat your little tiny pepper, now you know what you have in your hands. But, basically, that's the end of the talk, and I thank you for your time. 

[APPLAUSE]