How the Jalapeño Lost Its Heat

Food critic Brian Reinhart fell in love with spicy Mexican cuisine as a teenager in Texas, but over the years he started to notice that the jalapeños he’d buy in the grocery store were less and less hot. So he called up an expert who studies chili pepper genetics, and she shared a shocking revelation.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

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• 0:43Dan Pashman?

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• 1:23Dan Pashman?

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• 1:32Speaker 01

  I definitely felt like I was being shown the man behind the curtain. I felt like I was talking to somebody who was telling me that they knew what really happened to JFK or where the aliens are. Nobody's been hiding this information. Nobody's been conspiring with this information, but somehow, we just missed it.

• 1:54Dan Pashman?

  This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Today, we have an episode I am very excited to share from our old friends at Decoder Ring. In case you don't know, Decoder Ring is Slate's podcast about cracking cultural mysteries, hosted by the great Willa Paskin. Now, I love Decoder Ring. It's an excellent show, and we've teamed up with them in the past for an episode about hydration. Today, we're collaborating with them again for this episode called "How the Jalapeno Lost Its Heat." For more than a century, Americans have been obsessed with Mexican food, and ultimately have changed it. Willa speaks with Dallas-based food critic Brian Reinhart, who fell in love with spicy Mexican cuisine as a teenager, and also started to notice that the jalapenos he'd buy in the grocery store were less and less hot.

• 2:38Dan Pashman?

  Turns out, this is a real mystery. Let's see if they can crack it. Now, if you're listening to this episode, I hope you'll check out more Decoder Ring episodes, food mysteries, all kinds of stories, like how did a made-up fruit, the blue raspberry, take over the candy aisle? And why are leftover containers like Tupperware so trendy? Decoder Ring has episodes about the tooth fairy, ice cream trucks, plus one about the children's book "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie," and how it collided with the culture wars. Make sure to follow Decoder Ring wherever you get your podcasts. Now, here's Willa Paskin.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Brian Reinhart is a food writer, and when he was growing up in southern Indiana, he remembers that there was a way people talked about one particular cuisine: Mexican food.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  The perception I always had, what people told me, because they were Midwestern people, was, oh, well, you gotta be careful with Mexican food, because so much of it is so spicy, and those peppers, you gotta watch out for, because they'll light you up every time.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  One winter, Brian's family went on vacation to San Antonio, and Brian finally got to eat the real thing.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  It was, it was a revelation. It was December 27th, and we were sitting out on the River Walk. It was 70 degrees outside, and we were calling home, saying, yeah, we're, we're having enchiladas, and we're sitting outside, and there are all these, you know, ducks floating across the water, and we're enjoying everything, and all the people at home were saying, well, there's two feet of snow outside, and we're all miserable. So, we all started lobbying my dad, saying, can you get a job down here?

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Brian's family, lured in part by the taste of good Mexican food, moved to Texas when he was in high school.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  I moved down the week I turned 16. So then, visiting with friends and going out and everything turned into Mexican food or barbecue.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Brian's interest in food grew as he got older. And eventually, he began writing about it professionally. For the past two years, he's been a food critic at Dallas's D Magazine. He eats out in restaurants 200 times a year. But he and his girlfriend also cook at home, often Mexican food, often with hot peppers, some of which they grow in their own backyard.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  We've got some kind of bells. This year, we are growing shishito peppers for the first time. We love fish peppers. They're very tiny and they have racing stripes. They're beautiful.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  One kind of hot pepper Brian doesn't grow, though, is the jalapeno, a chili originally cultivated in Vera Cruz, Mexico. He shops for those at the supermarket. And a little while ago, he started to notice something.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  I kept buying jalapenos at the grocery store. And then, more and more frequently, it just tasted like a bell pepper. There was almost nothing to it. It was a very simple, straightforward pepper flavor.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  In jalapeno after jalapeno, it seemed to Brian like the spice was gone. And at first, he thought it was just him.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Maybe I've become conditioned because now I eat serrano peppers and now I cook with habanero peppers sometimes. And maybe I've just developed a greater heat tolerance. And then, finally, it started to get to the point where I felt like I must be going crazy. And then I started asking people, have you had this experience with jalapenos also? I'd be cooking and I'd hold one up and I'd say, what's wrong with these things? Have you noticed this? And more and more people started saying, yeah, they're basically, there's nothing to them. And then I said, you know what we can do? And I pulled out my phone. I texted, I think, like four or five different chefs all at once.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  The answers came back quickly.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  The first one was, yes, definitely. They're less hot than they used to be. The second one was, I tell my cooks, my hands must be too sweet because I can't make the salsa hot enough anymore.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  It wasn't just the taste that seemed different. Some people noticed that jalapenos looked different, too.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  I mean, you can, you can just look at old menus and cartoon type imagery where jalapenos used to have a big bend, like almost a 90 degree twist in the middle. But now, most of the jalapenos at the store are straight.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Like, what did you think was going on?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  I think my working theory was jalapeno growing operations were prioritizing growing them properly, keeping them happy compared to us at home where maybe we go out of town for a weekend and we forget about them and then we come back and they've been completely neglected and they become spicier because of that.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Right, so you took what you knew, which is that like peppers are spicier under stress and where you're like, these are the most well taken care of peppers.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  So they're not that spicy.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, we need a farm to just treat their peppers like absolute garbage. Just leave them for months and months and come back to them and say, oh, my gosh, I forgot we had these and then sell them.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Brian knew that if he was going to figure out the truth, he needed to run his theory by an expert. He immediately thought of New Mexico State University, which has a whole institute dedicated to chili peppers. He picked out one of their faculty members, dialed her up and told her everything you've just heard.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  And she started off very kindly and she said, I've heard these complaints before. You're not the first. And I felt really good for a moment. And then she said, but it goes a lot deeper and there's a lot better explanation available for you.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  And then she said, the peppers are designed that way.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  And I said, excuse me?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  And she said, well, it's completely on purpose.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  And that's when the story of the great chili pepper conspiracy really started to unfold.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  The shiny, dark green jalapeno is the workhorse of hot peppers. They're in hot sauces, enchiladas, and salsas. They're canned, pickled, fresh, and smoked into chipotles. And they outsell all other hot peppers in the United States. But these everyday chilies are a scientific and sociological marvel. A complicated testament to the American love affair with Mexican food, sitting right there on the grocery store shelf. In today's episode, we're going to tell the decades-long saga of the jalapeno and its fluctuating spice levels. It's a story about how this one pepper helped American palates progress from mild to medium

• 9:08Speaker 02

  to hot, and then couldn't keep up. So to test out his theory, Brian Reinhart had called an expert at New Mexico State University.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Someone named Stephanie Walker, because she had been the chair of the Chili Pepper Conference.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Yes, I've been getting a lot of calls about jalapenos lately.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  We called Dr. Stephanie Walker, too. She's a professor and extension vegetable specialist, and she got back to us during a break from planting.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  This is the time of year where we're putting our various chili experiments in the field.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Turns out, like Brian, Stephanie wasn't born with spice in her life.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  I didn't know anything about chili peppers or heat. When we moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, when I was starting middle school, I started eating chili. I developed a love for it. And then I actually, after I got my bachelor's degree, I went to work in a chili pepper processing facility, and that's where I really fell in love with chili peppers.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  So have jalapenos gotten less spicy?

• 10:08Speaker 03

  So, in my opinion, yes.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  And to really understand why, I asked Stephanie to start at the beginning. What is the thing that makes chili spicy?

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Oh, capsaicin. Capsaicin and very closely related chemicals are only made in members of the capsicum genus. So chili peppers are very unique in having that type of pungency that you experience when you eat chili peppers.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  I actually am really interested in like how jalapenos, but maybe more larger like chili peppers, grow? And also how they're bred? Like, how do we have all these different kinds of chili peppers to begin with? Are they just naturally occurring, or some of them?

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Oh, well, actually, they've been created by humans. So the original chili pepper, it's called the mother of all chili peppers, is the chiltepein type. So they're very small, usually round or slightly elongated peppers that grow in bushes. And even though the heat kind of evolved in chili peppers to dissuade mammals from eating them, human mammals discovered they loved this heat sensation. So humans then started the selecting process. So this goes back thousands of years. And just through humans actively selecting, we have the vast array of chili pepper varieties that we see today.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  And that vast array of different, human-selected breeds of peppers is what Stephanie emphasized to Brian.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  The point she made to me was the jalapeno is a family. There are so many different varieties of jalapeno. It is not just a pepper.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  And humans are still actively selecting when it comes to chili pepper varieties. In fact, it's key to what's happened to the jalapeno. In the early 1980s, demand for Mexican food was growing all over America. Sales at Mexican restaurants had doubled in just a few years. But consumer tastes varied widely.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Even though there's a lot of folks out there who love very, very hot jalapenos, there's a lot who don't like hot foods.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Companies wanted to be able to sell products at every level of spice. But there was this big problem, one Stephanie is very familiar with because she was working at a chili pepper processor back then.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  A big issue was predicting heat level. For chili peppers, predicting pungency is hard. So the pungency level of a different chili pepper variety Is based on genetics, but also the environment. When we did vats of salsa, we wanted to have it mild, medium, or hot. And if you happen to get like a load of jalapenos that was extra hot, we might mislabel a whole day's run of medium or mild salsa. So we actually had a program where our field department would go out and pre-sample fields before they were harvested so we could get a good idea, how hot are these peppers? How do we need to adjust the formulation when we make mild, medium, or hot salsa? And we discovered it didn't work.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  The chili peppers were just too unpredictable.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  But there is a more predictable substance, an extract called oleoresin capsaicin.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  Which is pure capsaicin extracted from hot chili peppers, basically.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  And then it's just like a liquid that you can-

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Very, very dangerous liquid. Yes. Yeah, the ingredient buckets have the skull and crossbones on it. And yeah, it's like pure, pure heat. So it's, uh, yeah, you don't want to mess with it.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Oleoresin capsaicin is the active ingredient in pepper spray. It makes it possible to take something mild and make it spicy. Whereas you can never take something spicy and make it mild. It's just like salt. You can add more, but you can't take any away. So a mild jalapeno, from the manufacturer's perspective, is actually a lot more versatile than a spicy one. And so as Brian Reinhart learned, companies thought growing a mild pepper could solve their problem.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Okay, well, if we can find a way to make sure that they're all mild, then we can choose the spice level. So as this problem became more widely known in the industry, agriculture departments and breeders started working on, how can we standardize the jalapeno pepper and get something that hits all the attributes that we want?

• 14:25Speaker 02

  And one of the people they called was a chili expert named Dr. Benigno Vialon, who goes by Ben, among other names.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  You know, they called me Dr. Pepper, you know? So I was the man for the job.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Ben's 88. He was raised on a vegetable farm in South Texas, and he has degrees in plant breeding, genetics, and pathology. He also worked at Texas A&M for 30 years, and that's where he was when the salsa industry reached out.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  They came to me, Pace Foods, Ola El Paso, La Victoria, and all of the big guys, they came to me and they said, if we had a mild jalapeno, we could sell a lot more salsa picante with less heat. So I said, well, we already have it. We've been working since 1972.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  In the 70s, Ben had been trying to breed a virus-resistant bell pepper by crossing it with different peppers, including jalapenos. After a lot of crossbreeding, he realized he'd inadvertently created a low-heat jalapeno.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  It took us about 10 years to get back to the jalapeno flavor. It's not an easy thing to do because every pepper, no matter what it is, has its own flavor profile.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  And they said that they wanted it because customers said that they didn't want spice?

• 15:39Speaker 04

  That's right. People don't like to get their mouths burned and all that kind of stuff. And so they said, why don't you release a mild jalapeno? And so a couple of years later, we did.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  That low-heat pepper was released in the early 1980s as the TAM jalapeno. TAM stands for Texas A&M. And it seemed to do exactly what the processing plants wanted.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  It was controllably mildly hot. It was resistant to bugs. It didn't develop kind of gnarly black spots. And it wasn't so curved. It's a glorious little invention.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  It was a huge, huge help to industry because suddenly you could get jalapenos. You could predict what the formulation was going to be.

• 16:24Speaker 04

  They were able to give you the mild, medium, and hot salsa. And that's when the salsa industry really started booming. Their sales went up, not only for the processing industry, but the fresh market also. By 1990, the United States outsold ketchup 2 to 1 with the mild salsa.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Things kicked up even more in the early 2000s, when the Tam 2 came out, an even milder, more predictable pepper developed by Ben's successor at Texas A&M. 60% of jalapenos go to processing plants, so that's what farmers prioritize. And so mild jalapenos became the dominant crop. So useful for mass-produced salsa, they've trickled into the produce aisle, too. And this seems to be happening more and more, according both to Brian's taste buds and even to those of Ben Vialon, the man who created the mild jalapeno in the first place.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  I don't like the ones at the store because they're hybrids and a lot of them don't have any heat at all.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  You don't like the ones at the store?

• 17:27Speaker 04

  No, because they don't even have flavors.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  I asked Brian how he felt when Stephanie explained that his experience was the result of a deliberate, decades-long effort to grow milder jalapenos.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  I definitely felt like I was being shown the man behind the curtain. I felt like I was talking to somebody who was telling me that they knew what really happened to JFK or where the aliens are. Nobody's been hiding this information. Nobody's been conspiring with this information. But somehow, we just missed it.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  And maybe part of the reason we missed it is because it's not the first time something like this has happened.

• 18:26Dan Pashman?

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• 20:00Dan Pashman?

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• 21:37Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. Hey, last week on the show, we did one of our salad spinners, and we covered a lot of ground. I chatted with Dina Shanker from Bloomberg and Mamri Hart, a comedian who just released a cookbook called All I Think About is Food, which obviously makes her an ideal guest. Now, in this salad spinner, we covered RFK Jr.'s war against food dyes. We asked why Americans are tipping less. And we discussed the rise of rip-and-dip bagels, a new trend where people tear off a piece of bagel and swipe it through a whole bunch of cream cheese. My guests had some thoughts.

• 22:05Speaker 05

  I do think there is something about you can have variation. I would like to try a couple different cream cheeses, but they would not go well together stacked.

• 22:13Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 22:13Speaker 05

  I want a little sauce buffet.

• 22:15Dan Pashman?

  You're really gonna do a big, deep dip. You're getting like a tablespoon of cream cheese in each bite.

• 22:21Speaker 05

  You're that talk about a bad ratio.

• 22:23Dan Pashman?

  Right, that's a bad ratio. And it's also like you're disrespecting the bagel.

• 22:26Speaker 05

  100%.

• 22:27Dan Pashman?

  So like-

• 22:27Speaker 05

  But this is America. And if I want that much, I should be given that option. Dip less.

• 22:33Dan Pashman?

  Also covered in this episode, the rise of tiny cocktails and what happens when the vibes of a restaurant are better than the food. This episode is fast, it's fun, you're gonna love it. Check it out wherever you got this one. All right, let's get back to our episode with Dakota Ring. Here again is Willa Paskin.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  What's happened to the jalapeno has happened before. In fact, it's happened over and over again.

• 22:56Speaker 06

  First and foremost, Americans have been obsessed with Mexican food from the moment they encountered it.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Gustavo Ariano is a columnist for the LA Times and the author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.

• 23:09Speaker 06

  Mexican food first starts getting into the American consciousness really in the 1880s, but explodes in the 1890s. And you had two dishes in particular that made it happen. One of them were tamales. Tamales are, of course, the quintessential Mexican food. On the other hand, you have chile con carne.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  In the plazas of San Antonio, women known as chili queens opened all-night, open-air restaurants serving up bowlfuls as guitars played. And tamale street vendors hawked their wares all over cities like San Francisco.

• 23:42Speaker 06

  And Americans were just so enticed by the scene of it. More importantly, they were enticed by the food. And the American media got curious about them. And so you started seeing these dispatches in publications like The Atlantic, like Harper's Weekly.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  How are they describing them? Like, what are they saying about them?

• 23:58Speaker 06

  They always, they always end up obsessing on the spice. You have these stereotypes like that it tastes like the fires of hell, but they're not disparaging it. They're not disparaging it. They are praising it, but warning people in advance, hey, this is gonna be hot.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  The dishes became even more well-known after the 1893 Chicago World Fair.

• 24:22Speaker 06

  And that's arguably where Mexican food had its nationwide debut. The city of Chicago is awash with tamale vendors. Chicago's also the meatpacking capital of the United States. It's also the canning capital. So as this is happening, these big companies, they get the brilliant idea of packing tamales in a can and packing chile con carne in a can. They then spread around the rest of the United States and Americans gobble it up.

• 24:58Speaker 06

  So those were the two first famous dishes that Americans got obsessed over. And then every decade, everything that I just told you repeats. Every decade you have Americans quote unquote discovering something at a restaurant and travel somewhere. They become obsessed with it. Entrepreneurs then spread it around the rest of the United States. Americans love it, eat it to the point where it becomes assimilated into the American diet. And then Americans say, okay, what's next? I want something more quote unquote authentic. It happens almost every decade.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  It happens in the 1900s with chili powder, in the 1920s with rice and beans. And then entrepreneurs sell the country on margaritas and fajitas and especially on tacos.

• 25:53Speaker 06

  And onward and onward, it has been a slow but steady march of Mexican food conquering American palates and stomachs.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  When the food or the dish or the ingredient becomes like so omnipresent, does there start to be this conversation about like it's not as good?

• 26:09Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it's partly true though, and a lot of this does have to do with the mass production of the cuisine. I mean, look, when you're going to mass produce anything, you have to sacrifice certain attributes. You have to commodify everything. So people who grow ingredients for Mexican food in the United States have always modified their flavor so they could become more popular. You're talking about jalapenos right now, but in Mexico, remember tequila can only come from five states in Mexico. It's a protected designation. Well, in the 1940s, these tequila producers realized, hey, Americans are starting to come to Mexico in record numbers. They're liking our tequila, but they find it too harsh. Let's change the recipe.

• 26:54Speaker 06

  So they changed the recipe to make it more palatable to Americans. And we all know what happened with tequila. It becomes a huge, huge sensation to the point now, of course, where you're getting these same tequila companies. Now you have tequila companies saying, we need to make tequila for Mexicans. And of course, the Americans don't want the Americanized tequila anymore. They want the Mexicanized tequila.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Well, so, I mean, it sounds like there's this kind of paradox, right? Like, there's this growing taste for spiciness, or for tequila, for something. And then it starts to take off. And then this, businesses are like, oh, we actually need to get even bigger. So we have to standardize even more. And then it does get bigger, and it is really popular. But it opens up space for certain consumers to be like, no, no, we want, like, the first thing.

• 27:39Speaker 06

  You mentioned paradox, that's the best way of putting it. The American consumer at first, they want something that's watered down. They accept it. You have an entire industry being created to match what they wanted originally. But then the American gets inured to that modified flavor profile. And then that's when they want more. But by then, it's too late.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  And that's the story of jalapenos, too. In the latter part of the 20th century, Americans became interested in salsas and the peppers that go into them.

• 28:15Speaker 06

  The jalapeño immediately resonated with American palates. The name itself is just so intriguing. Jalapeno? You know, the American just gets so intrigued by foreign words, and jalapeño? I mean, god, you want to talk about a Mexican word? Try jalapeño. The J is pronounced like a "ha." Then you have the little tilde, of course, on top. The little squiggly thing and the N, which turns into an "ña." And then if you really want to go deep track, jalapeño refers to the town of Jalapa in the state of Veracruz. And Jalapa, just to confuse Americans more, is with an X. So it's just, the name itself is so intriguing.

• 28:59Speaker 06

  And this is all, by the way, before you actually taste it. And then you taste it, I mean, you have to put yourself in the mindset of Americans in the 60s and 70s, when Mexican food is still not where it is today. Of course, they're going to get intrigued.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  And they wanted it in their salsas and hot sauces. As long as it wasn't too hot. So breeders developed mild peppers for processors. And suddenly, they were everywhere.

• 29:23Speaker 07

  Pea-sticking, chunky salsa puts only fresh jalapenos in every jar. For that bold taste born in San Antonio. This stuff's baited.

• 29:33Speaker 08

  New York City. New York City.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  But as non-Mexicans ate more and more of this stuff, their palates changed in turn.

• 29:40Speaker 06

  There was a point where Americans or non-Mexicans could not stand heat at all. But yes, as the decades have gone on, Americans have gotten a tolerance for salsa spice. And Americans are starting to escalate their heat to the point now, of course, where we have the hot ones and you have kids just loving all of it. And adults too, for that matter, Americans more than anything. You don't see Mexicans doing these [BLEEP] contests where like, oh, I'm gonna eat 15 Carolina Reapers at once. What you just ate is the hottest, most disgusting hot sauce in the world. That's such an American thing. It's kind of funny and kind of pathetic, too.

• 30:14Speaker 09

  I feel like I'm gonna die.

• 30:16Speaker 06

  I know.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  This is the actor Jennifer Lawrence on the popular YouTube show Hot Ones, where guests eat increasingly spicy hot stuff.

• 30:26Speaker 09

  I don't know what to, nothing helps.

• 30:28Speaker 06

  I know, I know.

• 30:29Speaker 09

  Is my face okay?

• 30:32Speaker 06

  That is just masochism. I don't want that.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Do you, have you noticed that jalapenos in particular have gotten mild?

• 30:37Speaker 06

  No, because for me, the jalapeno was never spicy to begin with. The hottest jalapenos are not that hot. But so jalapenos historically, at least in my family, you would use them for the flavor. A good jalapeno has a good verdant flavor to it. Very fresh, very invigorating flavor, the way other chiles don't have. But there's nothing wrong with putting a little bit of spice into it. I, I'll, I do not take a little bottle of hot sauce with me to diners, but I do take a big, huge serrano. I just went, I just ate out of French Bistro the other day. And I'm like, what was it? I, I had a croque madame yesterday. French, I love French food. They're not gonna have any heat. I need a little bit of heat. So I whipped out my serrano. My friend who was with me, he didn't blink because he knows who I am.

• 31:22Speaker 06

  But the waitress comes in, she's like, oh, did we give you one? I'm like, no. And she was impressed. She's like, okay.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Do you, do you ask for a knife? Like, what do you do with it? Or are you just like?

• 31:29Speaker 06

  With, with, for a chile, the serrano? Hell no. It's called the chile de mordida, a biting chili. So you get it, you eat it, and you eat it like a carrot. That's, oh my God, cutting it up into small little pieces. That's fun. I mean, you do that, but no, no, no. If you're gonna bring a chile, you eat it así de mordida, like biting. And it was freaking good. And the, the owners of the restaurant, they were bemused. And I told them, look, your food's absolutely amazing. Don't get me wrong. It was super, super good. But I still need some spice, you know? I'm a Mexican.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  For Gustavo, what's happened to Mexican food over and over again is on the whole a good thing because even imperfect Mexican food can bring people together.

• 32:09Speaker 06

  I could tell you how loathe Mexicans have always been and how loathe Mexican food was, but now you have kids growing up, your kids, growing up with good hot sauces. You know, people in Southern California, in the American Southwest, in Colorado, white kids growing up with Mexican food as part of their mother's milk, so to speak, and growing up with Mexicans. It does make relationships better between Mexicans and Americans. So I do remain optimistic that Americans will all eventually become Mexicans.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  If you go to a supermarket, basically anywhere in America at this point, there is an aisle where there will be salsa. Lots and lots and lots of salsa. A bounty of options. And many of these options are only possible because of the existence of a mild jalapeno. But the rub is that this same jalapeno is in another part of the grocery store, the produce aisle, keeping us from having options in our cooking. Brian Reinhart again.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  I think the issue is not so much that the tam pepper exists. I think that the failing, the failing came at the marketplace when they took over and we didn't really understand what was happening. We didn't understand that a certain amount of choice was going away or that even that there is another kind of jalapeno available at this point. That was certainly not their intention. They didn't mean to dominate the market in that way. They didn't intend for us all to forget that another kind of pepper existed.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  For me, I mean, I'm lucky. I can always just go out to our own fields and harvest jalapenos if I wish to get the heat level I want.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  Dr. Stephanie Walker, the pepper expert again.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  But yeah, if you're just at the mercy of grocery stores or even farmers markets, it's going to be harder to get exactly what you may want.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  If you go to a grocery store and you like are in the aisle, can you just eyeball them and be like, I know what you want?

• 34:14Speaker 03

  No, no, no, you can't.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  So there's no hope for the rest of us either, then, or you can't? Stephanie hopes we're on the cusp of an heirloom pepper movement, like what's happened with tomatoes. The grocery store just used to sell generic red softballs, but now you can get colorful, wrinkly, tasty heirloom tomatoes in every shape and size, in markets, in restaurants, and even plant them in your own garden.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  If you want a good hot jalapeno, buy some of these heirloom varieties. Plant your own. If you're a chef and want a predictable heat, a predictable flavor in your peppers, for goodness sakes, don't just say, I want mild peppers. I want hot peppers. Get to know these varieties because these are, as with wine grapes, as with heirloom apples. They're very unique and we need to celebrate this amazing germplasm and hope that we keep it available.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  In the meantime, you can just do what Dr. Ben Viallon, aka Dr. Pepper, the one who created the first mild jalapeno, does and make a different choice at the market.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  I know, I go for the serrano's at the supermarket because they're hot.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  And if the day ever comes when your serrano peppers start to taste different, well, maybe it's not just you.

• 35:33Dan Pashman?

  Our thanks to Willa Paskin and the whole Decoder Ring crew. If you're looking for more food mysteries from Decoder Ring, check out their episode on the rise of the blue raspberry. They also did a great episode on how Tupperware became a household name. Make sure you subscribe to Decoder Ring wherever you get your podcasts. Next week on the show, I talk with comedian Sebastian Maniscalco. He tells me about going from torching hams to earn a little extra cash to selling out Madison Square Garden many times over. Plus, he shares his rules for being a good dinner party guest. That's next week. While I wait for that one, check out last week's show, our salad spinner with reporter Deena Shankar and comedian Mamory Hart. We get into the new rules on tipping, the rise of tiny cocktails, and why people are now ripping and dipping their bagels. That one's up now. Check it out. This episode was produced by Evan Chung,

• 36:17Dan Pashman?

  Decoder Ring's supervising producer. Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin, Katie Shepard, and Max Friedman. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. The Sporkful is produced by me along with managing producer, Emma Morgenstern, and senior producer, Andres O'Hara. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music.

• 37:01Dan Pashman?

  The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 37:07Speaker 10

  And I'm Stephanie in Cincinnati, Ohio, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

• 37:23Speaker 11

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