by Mark Hester

The world’s most exciting and flavorful dishes — like the the curries of India, salsas of Latin America, jerk meats of the Caribbean and the piri piri of Africa — all use chiles to bring heat and flavor to the table.

But they are not only incredibly versatile and tasty, they are also quite interesting.

Chile Facts to Spice Up Your Next Dinner Conversation

#1 – First let’s get it straight — it’s Chile with an “e.”  Chili (with an “i”) is the Cowboy stew made with beef and beans that they completely ruin in Cincinnati.  However the best chili usually includes some chiles.

#2 – Chile peppers originated in the New World.  In spite of being an important part of the cuisines of Africa, Indian and Southeast Asia, they were completely missing in these parts until the sixteenth century when Spanish explorers brought them back from North and South America.  Just how quickly they caught on and how completely they dominate the foods of these areas today shows just how wonderful they are.

#3 – Today the country of India is the world’s largest grower of chiles — despite the late start (Reread #2.)

#4 – Like the tomato, the Chile is a fruit.  Believe it or not.

#5 – The substance that makes many chiles burn is a chemical called capsaicin.  The heat level is measured by a scale using something called Scoville Units.  It’s way too complicated to explain fully how it works in this short article — but here are a few chile pepper you may be familiar with and there Scoville ratings to give you some idea of what it is all about:

Pepperoncini (these are those greenish yellow peppers you see on most Greek salads and with Papa John’s Pizzas) – usually about 200 Scoville Units

Jalapenos (everybody knows these — they are the green rings on nachos you get at the ball park) – range from about 1,000 to 5,000 Scoville Units

Thai pepper (tiny, tiny little heat bomb found in some Chinese dishes — you’ll know when you get one) – 100,000 Scoville Units

Red Savino Habanero (currently the world’s hottest known pepper) – an unbelievable blistering 500,000 Scoville Units!

Did you catch that?  Read it again.  The Red Savino is 100 to 500 times hotter than a Jalapeno!

#6 – Peppers are never poisonous.  Never.  Though a Thai or Red Savino Habanero may make you wish you were dead.

By the way, dairy products (milk, yogurt) are good for helping to cool the heat.  Water will not help much and alcohol will actually make it worse.  The only real cure is time.  It will eventually go away.

#7 – Chiles got the name “pepper” (like black pepper) thanks to a combination of hopeful thinking, faulty assumptions and false advertising.

Early explorers typically were not looking for glory or new lands to conquer — they were looking for ways to get spices, in particular “black pepper”, to Europe more quickly and cheaply.  Spices built the early fortunes of many cities and even countries along the spice route.

It was this goal, a quicker, cheaper route to the black pepper fields of India, that caused Christopher Columbus to set out sailing west to get east.  He didn’t even know about the New World until he ran smack into it.  (Actually, he died never knowing he had landed anywhere but India.  But that’s a-whole-nother article.)  He and many of the Spanish and Dutch explorers that followed never found that black pepper they were looking for (which grows only in India), but they did find chiles.   Making the best of a bad situation, the dried and ground them up and they became “Jamaican Pepper” in Europe.  Sadly the name stuck and has by today come to mean not only the dried powder but also the fresh pod and even the plant itself.