Once again been a while between updates.
Not that much to report this time, but I finally got around to doing something with that first small harvest. I bought a dehydrator and dried most of that harvest:
Sugar Rush Peach Striped doesn't look quite as good dried:
I actually hadn't dried peppers since my very first year growing so this was a bit of trial and error but I had success straight away. Had the dehydrator at 70C (158F) and I think they were dry after 8 hours but left it to run overnight. I turned it off after about 20 hours and all peppers had dried.
I also did this in my kitchen without any special ventilation which also worked surprisingly well. There was a fair bit of pepper fragrance in the air the first couple of hours but it was definitely not a cloud of chemical warfare. In hindsight that's probably due to all peppers being quite mild, don't think any of them had over 100K SHU.
Speaking of Sugar Rush Peach Striped, I have culled my two plants. One of them was still not giving correct peppers and honestly it just looked like it has some disease. The other plant which did grow true hadn't set any new pods for a while and I didn't really need more anyway, so it was culled too.
I'm just waiting for some more ripe Black Scorpion Tongue peppers, then I will get rid of those plants as well. They've served their purpose and I do want to give my other plants more space, if possible.
Most of you have probably seen my post in the "Identification" part of the forum where I eventually realised I had mixed up my labels.
So I have tried the Cumari:
Nice citrus aroma and a very strong citrus flavor that actually reminds me a lot of oranges.
Quite hot despite its small size, probably around Habanero level.
I chopped a few pods and used in some enchiladas the past weekend and that worked quite well. But I don't know what to do with these peppers. Going to harvest them this weekend (probably upwards of 50) and try to figure out what to with them. Maybe they'd be good for pickling? Powder, sauce, etc doesn't seem like a good idea due to how small they are.
I also accidentally snapped this pod off its plant:
When I tried it I thought it was a Scotch Bonnet Brown, but seemed way too hot for that. Turns out it was a Chocolate Hand Grenade
Aroma was fresh with some grassy notes. The heat was very explosive and hit immediately so it was hard to tell any specific flavors. Speaking of the heat I think it was at the upper ranges of a Habanero.
I've also tried the Scotch Brains XCP:
My seeds are from a strain that's still unstable so I have a couple of different pod types. This one does look a bit like a Scotch Bonnet I guess and I have one other that shows more Brain Strain genes, round but very gnarly.
This one had a nice citrus aroma and the flavor was very, very grassy but also quite refreshing. It was surprisingly tasty with a good immediate heat that mostly lingered at the front of the mouth. As with the Chocolate Hand Grenade, I would say this one was at the upper ranges of a Habanero, maybe even a little bit hotter.
It's going to be interesting to try the other pod and see how the heat is because this variety is reported to be closer to 800K SHU, which this pod was nowhere close to.
I've tried one more pepper, but forgot to take a photo of the pod before cutting, the MA Pale Rider:
It had a surprise with a pod within a pod
There was also some thick pools with capsaicin oils
The aroma, which was sweet, fresh and grassy, was very strong and I could feel it standing a few feet away.
As usual when trying "new to me" peppers I only had a small piece first and couldn't really get any specific flavors from it and the heat level felt like habanero. Trying to remember what I had read about it I thought that it should be around that heat level, so I ate a quarter of the pod.
And... holy #¤)/#¤!"#!#!#¤/¤!!!
It was hot, very hot, but definitely manageable. That piece was probably a few hundred thousand scoville more, but what came next I was not prepared for.
When it reached my stomach it immediately felt like someone had dropped a Menthos in a bottle of Coke, it got very, very upset and I didn't know what to do with myself. Tried sitting, tried laying down, standing, walking, nothing was comfortable.
But slowly it subsided and we moved to the next phase. You know that feeling when a limb falls asleep, that tingling, prickly feeling that gets worse the deeper it falls asleep. Imagine the worst one you've felt, I had that from my fingertips to my elbows, even my jaw tingled.
I was so focused on just managing all the various sensations that it took me a while before I noticed I had gotten the "Naga claw" on one of my hands. So I relaxed that hand but as soon as I didn't actively control it it went back to that claw shape.
When this was finally receding I got to the final stage... That "sleeping limb" feeling I felt it all around my stomach, super weird and it almost felt like cramping.
All of this I experienced for about 30 minutes and I could do absolutely nothing for those 30 minutes, only try to cope.
Once most of it had subsided my entire body felt like it had gotten a really, really heavy workout.
Now, I've eaten superhots before, but only tiny pieces so I have never experienced anything like this before and while enduring it I was cursing myself and telling myself to stop eating raw peppers. But once I had gone through it, it kind of felt good, to actually have "ridden the wave" and come out on the other side. We'll see if I dare eating big pieces of my other superhots this season
Anyway, back to the MA Pale Rider. I didn't get much flavor from that piece either and it's a bit difficult to judge the heat level. Based on what I felt in my mouth I would say about 700K SHU, but based on how my body reacted I would guess closer to 1 million.
