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Need ID on this small, spicy pumpkin-shaped pepper

aremington1612

aremington1612

Hi guys.
 
So last year while on Christmas vacation, I by chance bumped into an old college dormmate of mine. He was with his buddies, and he called me over. All of them were daring me to bite into this one pepper.. which didn't look like one at all. It looked like a pumpkin. I've never seen anything like it before.
 
I did (like an idiot LOL), and the heat was overwhelming for someone who is used to eating Thai Bird's Eye and pequin peppers. As my reward for the dare, I got to take home some seeds. I planted them and took good care of them, and now am currently reaping the rewards of my very first chili harvest.
 
Anyone know what this is? I'm no expert on chilis, and these are my first plants ever grown.
 
Here are some pictures.
 

 
 

 
 

 
 
 
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I looked up both those varieties.. I'm leaning a bit myself towards Star of Turkey?
 
The Brazillian Starfish seems to really point outwards somewhat sharply.. Mine are round, almost pumpkin-ish... but are also a tad smaller than the pictures I can gander from both varieties on Google. I have no idea what these would look like though if I had really fertilized the soil around them, I'm still quite a newbie and all I did really was water the pots every other day. Perhaps what I have is what comes off a somewhat malnourished plant. I have no clue.
 
The peppers that I have are hot, but the heat is more of a slowly building type. The pepper is actually very sweet. The hotness is concentrated in the central point where the seeds are, the walls themselves have very little capsaicin content. I can cut the pepper, and if my nose is about a foot close my nostrils sense the sweet stinging scent of the pepper. Also, rather curiously, I become very sleepy after I eat one of these. My mind gets all sluggish and I seem to get a little bit of a "high" off of it for some reason.
 
I'm a tad happy that these peppers of mine seem to be rather far-reached. Brazil or Turkey, huh. I really had no clue when I first encountered it,  only that it wasn't like anything else I've ever seen up to that moment.
 
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They look a lot like the Brazilian Starfish I grew from Pepperlover last year.
Mine had a definite baccatum flavor, and for what ever reason, had very little heat until late in the growing season (but were still mild in my opinion). 
 
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Since the Brazillian Starfish and the Star of Turkey look quite similar, but are both from different families of pepper.. I decided to look for whatever difference I could between these two families.
 
I looked at the flowers of both families on Wikipedia.. The flowers on my plant look exactly like what I see in the c. chinense page. The baccatum page has flowers that seem to almost be composed of one single unified petal, where mine clearly has a row of individual petals.
 
My flowers look exactly like the c. chinense flowers you see below.
 

 
My apologies for not photographing the flowers, I didn't think to do so.
 
Also I remember reading up about the Brazillian Starfish.. which has a rather low scoville rating. With a single pepper from this, one can easily add some fire into any dish. Compared to the local wild frutescens chili we call "siling labuyo", which are rated at somewhere around 80,000 SHU, these peppers are easily much hotter.
 
So I think it's safe to say that I have a Star of Turkey.
 
Thanks for the help everyone, you guys are awesome. ;)
 
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Looks too fat for Brazilian Starfish, I grew some this season. Pretty tasty pepper, roughly jalapeño heat. Also the pods are LARGE not small. There is also the Brazilian pumpkin pepper. But your pods are too flat for that one.
 
A third consideration Starfish have a belly button.
Bs7p0bg.jpg

 
So I would say yours is likely Star of Turkey, like you suspect.
 
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