I took this pepper picture two weeks ago. I wanted the first peppers mainly for their seed so I left it on the plant hoping to get the good, mature seeds. Then there comes a day when I just can't take it any more. Today was that day.
I dissected it and carefully extracted every seed with tiny tweezers. A haul of 28 beautiful seeds. I was pleased with that. Dang, it smelled delicious. Now time to eat.
I didn't split it evenly down the middle during the dissection. It was about 1/3 and 2/3 so I cut off the little pecker part and the bottom of the pod from the biggest part and ate it. Very tasty and (initially) surprisingly mild. I didn't spend a whole bunch of time chewing this puppy and wolfed it down rather quickly. Haha, that was my first mistake.
Just about the time I swallowed, the heat started coming on strong in the mouth. Then the blowtorch hit the back of my throat. In no time at all my lips felt like fire balloons and of course, I got a little sweaty with liquids liberally flowing from most of the openings in my head. This closely followed by burps and hiccups and then a huge bonfire in my belly. I wasn't ready for the amount of heat and pain in my belly so I bailed and hit the sour cream kinda hard. Straight Reaper for breakfast on an empty stomach was my second mistake.
So that's the story of my first taste of a Carolina Reaper. The first pepper off of the cantankerous plants I've been sweet talking for more than a year. It was an awesome endorphin buzz. Now that I know what they are, the next pepper I eat will be a little less exciting. More chew, less gulp.
I chopped up the rest of that first pepper and put it into a 16 oz jar of my favorite ghost pepper salsa. Now that stuff is genuinely bad to the bone. The Reaper definitely has a lot more fire than the few Scorpions I got last year. Nice thing about this year is I'll have a whole bunch of both.
