I have seen the hotness of peppers vary *greatly* between the same species in the same garden, and even on the same plant. How do restaurants and other food preparers manage to get a product with consistent hotness?
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I’ve found at least when picking out jalapeños at the grocery store that the ones with the “stretch marks” are consistently hot.
Restaurants *don’t* always get consistently spicy peppers. In my experience, sometimes we’d get a box of jalapeños that were perfect, and other times they would have literally no heat at all. Hungarian peppers were consistently spicy, though. I think that the range of possible capsaicin levels depend on the species of pepper, and not growing and harvesting. But I could be wrong.
If it’s an individual element, you taste it.
As a chef you are sampling the product constantly. It’s drilled into you at culinary school to taste everything. The little pockets on our aprons are for tasting spoons and thermometers.
When you are dealing with volume, which is often the case, you sample a few but the sheer quanity balances out heat level. Then you taste it again.
For commercial or industrial food prep, vendors have some quality control at a macro level. They taste/inspect every X number of pallets before processing. However, processing averages out heat level as well.
Red seal chef here…
We do several things to ensure consistency of flavour.
1.) massive batches smooth out spikes and valleys in flavours.
2.) we taste the food A LOT! When making a batch of something it is common to have tasted it upwards of 20 times to ensure it tastes right (20 is a lot and you don’t hit that amount to often)
3.) consistency in product. When we use something like peppers, we stick to one supplier as much as possible.
These three factors will pretty much guarantee it tastes the same every time every day.
The weather conditions can influence the heat as well. Cooler weather the hotter the pepper (in general). I was told it does not even take a lot of chilly nights to bump the heat, two or three is enough.
I like a little bit of pain with my heat, not much, but if you start squirming a bit that is good. I had a favorite taco stand in Tucson, they made a killer chilli Verde burrito (pork in green salsa). Usually it was the perfect heat, but some fall/spring days, ay caramba was it hot. Nothing that a little bit of sour cream or cheese couldn’t handle though (I know I know)
Such a great question. In fact the whole Scoville scale of chillies seems flawed on this one for this exact reason. One blows your head off the other, of the same chillie is mild!!
Good chefs taste their food as they go along. They don’t just “put in 2tsp of salt”. They add the salt and make sure it tastes how they want it to.
I once saw Gordon Ramsay yelling at some chefs because they refused to taste the food. They kept insisting “I know what it tastes like”. Turns out they didn’t.
When i worked in a restaurant we got fresh chillipeppers delivered every week. And the spicyness varied ALOT. From sometimes very mild to very spicy. We grilled then and put them ontop of the burger. So it was impossible to know the spicyness until costumer feedback.
Bell Curve prepping. Eventually the outliers get swamped out by all those jalapeños that just want to get along.
I have seen pepper farms where pickers are given cards with the exact hue that denotes the perfect ripeness of the pepper, and they would only pick peppers exactly matching that color.
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