chinense Store bought habanero vs. home grown habanero

Ive been purchasing orange habaneros from my local grocery stores for going on 10 years now. Over that time I've noticed a gradual change in the size,shape,color and heat of the habs offered. Over this time the peppers seem to me to have gotten quite a bit bigger(almost double to triple in size),longer less round and they all use to be dark orange. Now I'd say most of them are more of a light orange to cream color. The heat level seems to have dropped tremendously. Although some of that could be my tolerance going up. Any one else notice this? When I compare to the orange hab I got off my own plant its night and day difference. Just an observation I noticed. I guess its probably more profitable to tone down the heat to make it usable by more of the general public.
 
Thinking now that spicy is in vogue that industry is trying to provide a one size fits all habanero to sell to the masses. That and there is this strange thing going on with the spice faddists.  They want to seem all about the heat, but a lot of them dont get above rooster sauce.  Thinking that is why Wendy's efforts towards spicing up their ghost pepper fries involves only a slight bow in the direction of India.  They slap the name on something but dont want to spice it up because the fadidists cant manage the heat.
 
If you cant take the heat, you probably shouldnt order ghost anything. If they do, teach them what the ghost is all about
 
I have found that everything that I have grown on my own tastes better than anything that I can buy in the store. I am sure it has to do with the freshness of what I can harvest at home, plus the tend to pick fruits and vegetable prior to being ripe so they last longer and ripen in the store I believe which would reduce the flavor. So I honestly do not remember the last time I bought a habanero from the store, I have had to buy a few jalapenos or bell peppers on occasion and they do not taste as good as mine but are much larger. I am sure the altered genetics has something to do with that.
 
My wife bought a few habaneros recently to make her salsa.  I did find their color a little muted.  Taste was off, too!  I am in the camp that what you grow will taste better than store bought.  Garden to table today versus picked for shipping from Mexico or Chile.  Like avocados this time of year, we pick from the tree.  If we need to buy any during the off season, we choose California grown versus chili.
 
LordHill said:
If you cant take the heat, you probably shouldnt order ghost anything. If they do, teach them what the ghost is all about
Thats the weird part, it works the other way around in mass consumer sort of things.  Wendy's ghost fries, Popeye Chicken, and Red Robbin all had Ghost this or Ghost that and none were hot.  It is very odd.
 
pepperrookie said:
 I am in the camp that what you grow will taste better than store bought. 
I agree very much, even more so with tomato.
 
I can say that the jalapeno peppers I grow taste 10 x better than the ones in the stores. There is no comparison. Its the same difference with a home grown tomato vs a store bought one. For some reason my Jals are not as hot but the flavor more than makes up for the heat difference.
 
ajdrew said:
Thats the weird part, it works the other way around in mass consumer sort of things.  Wendy's ghost fries, Popeye Chicken, and Red Robbin all had Ghost this or Ghost that and none were hot.  It is very odd.
Well, considering how much I enjoy videos of people eating supers, and nothing is better than people who are cocky about it, I guess I wont complain. More videos of mass consumers going in thinking they have experienced ghost peppers should keep youtube entertaining for the forseeable future
 
You could pull some seeds from the store bought and grow them out.  That would give you an idea if its a genetic change or environmental.
 
Just once did I find truly hot Habaneros at the grocery store but when I rushed back to the market they were already gone (someone probably complained). I never trust the color which usually seems to look a bit off to me. The color also often seems too consistent like they have been enhanced somehow, or maybe they have a line of workers picking out peppers that look too real or something.
 
One day I spotted a container that was not marked "Hot" like the Mexican Habs. It was identified as Jamaican Habanero and marked "Very Hot". I am guessing there is no QC at all because whoever marked them "Very Hot" would probably poop tears if he ever bit into a bell pepper.
 
In these GMO enhanced days of targeted produce manufacturing, I am willing to bet that heat is trumped by general appeal for the mass market priorities. It is much more financially viable to train a generation that they can handle a toned down pepper than it is to market a pepper with real heat that only a small percentage can handle.
 
It is very challenging trying to satisfy a pepper addiction at the grocery store, but I figure if alcoholics in a dry village can drink mouthwash and learn to filter food coloring through bread for their fix then I owe it to my addiction to give it a reasonable effort. A pepper fresh off the vine has never made my acquaintance  :mope:  
 
Wife and I dream of providing room, board and decent wages for a small number of people working the farm.  My thing is, there is strength in numbers, so a group can get more done than the individuals alone.  Her thing is she wants to goof on the neighbors and call it a commune.  In that light, she wants us all that trying to figure out why home grown tastes so much better is pointless.  You see everyone knows it tastes better because it is grown with peace an love.

Now I feel like chanting to my plants.
 
mralaska said:
Just once did I find truly hot Habaneros at the grocery store but when I rushed back to the market they were already gone (someone probably complained). I never trust the color which usually seems to look a bit off to me. The color also often seems too consistent like they have been enhanced somehow, or maybe they have a line of workers picking out peppers that look too real or something.
 
One day I spotted a container that was not marked "Hot" like the Mexican Habs. It was identified as Jamaican Habanero and marked "Very Hot". I am guessing there is no QC at all because whoever marked them "Very Hot" would probably poop tears if he ever bit into a bell pepper.
 
In these GMO enhanced days of targeted produce manufacturing, I am willing to bet that heat is trumped by general appeal for the mass market priorities. It is much more financially viable to train a generation that they can handle a toned down pepper than it is to market a pepper with real heat that only a small percentage can handle.
 
It is very challenging trying to satisfy a pepper addiction at the grocery store, but I figure if alcoholics in a dry village can drink mouthwash and learn to filter food coloring through bread for their fix then I owe it to my addiction to give it a reasonable effort. A pepper fresh off the vine has never made my acquaintance  :mope:
In early 2014 I bought some red Habs from a Weis grocery store in the Poconos PA. I was staying at someone's home and didn't have any heat to spice up my food.

I didn't expect much from them, but man, they put an unexpected beating on me when I ate a pod straight up. Cap cramps were brutal. Bear in mind, I consider my tolerance to have been higher than average at that point.

Given that I never knew what variety they were (package just said Habanero but they looked like Savina to me, which I've grown in the past), but I was damn impressed just the same, I saved the seeds and grew them out this season.

Plant is very prolific and pods are just starting to ripen. I will sample my wares when they go red to see how the heat compares to what I picked up in the poconos.
 
I have seen more commercial habanero hybrids popping up. One is called Helios (see Johnny seed). Advertised as an "early" and higher yield harvest pod, I believe it's crossed with a jalapeño or similar. The pod is larger and less hot than a true hab. You may be seeing something similar in stores.
 
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