Hi Jimster - I don't subscribe to be a habanero head, but I have been growing them for the past five years, (along with Anaheim and Jalapeno's) I beleve they work well when they are part of a layering within a fresh salsa. There are numerous other ways to use them but for the most part they are the "heat" :-)and I would never just chomp on one.

Dave - Southern California

Jim,

I love the flavor of Habaneros in various bottled hot sauces. I find it superior to Tabasco, etc. But in chili and other such stews, it seems Habaneros just add heat and their peculiar flavor is lost in the mix.

Mostly, I grow Habs just to look at since I think the plants with their colorful pendant pods are beautiful. I usually just give the peppers away to the Mommies in the kitchen at Smokey Bones here. What they do with them I dunno, but they always are appreciative.

Bill

I grow them for powder, and sandwich slices.

Another good way to eat them is put a bunch in a blender, turn them into puree, and splash liberally over everything else you eat that you didn't first put a slice or powder on :)

Roasted and chopped habs add a lot of flavor and pep to chili. Rest assured, whatever you add them to -- you don't need to add very much. :-)

I'm starting to get the idea. Any more suggestions?

Jim

Normally I slice them and mix em into anything. If I am cooking for others I have to keep the heat level down.

I've diced and mixed 2 habs into 2lbs of ground beef to make burgers and everyone can handle that. I might slice 1 up and put it on top too. You can dry them, grind them, slice them, dice them. You can freeze them too, but I never have. Mainly cause they get gobbled up before they need freezing.

Lastly, I have ate a dozen or so fresh habs, and no, not all at once. Some of the time it was on a dare or to freak out a girl. The rest of the time it was my insanity. I'd rather have a fresh hab, than a bar of chocolate. I love the heat and more importantly the flavor.

PS The habs I ate were all orange. No red savinas....yet! :-O

Great thread!

Maybe you don't want to get this involved, but I make Habanero jam, either by themselves or with peaches, strawberries, anything. It is wonderful.

There must be something to this habanero thing. The Mexicans are having trouble meeting the Japanese demand for habs.

Anyone want to organize a tour of the Yucatan in January to investigate the uses of habs?

Jim

The best use of habaneros with which I am familiar is jerked meats.

There's a carribean restaurant here that uses scotch bonnets in jerk sauce....sometimes picante, sometimes not so picante.

I liquefy them, mix them with egg and garlic and a couple drops of soap and spray them all over the garden and repel the #&%(&$ Deer!

personally, Habaneros are the best pepper for making hot sauce. Not to mention the millions of other things you can do with them! As long as your canned peppers are aged long enough the heat and flavor start to level with eachother. Keep em canned for a year and the heat will diminish leaving only the hab flavor in your sauce! ENJOY

Last season i had like about 20 habanero plants, love to grow em, water em, watch em grow, and the beauty of pods hanging in many colors, and to people that don't know it's habanero pepper, i tell them that it's a tomato and tempt them to bite into one. (i know i'm mean, but i love it :)
and the first batch (about more than a grocery plastic bag)i gave it away, and then contributed every plant to Katrina and Rita. And if you're gonna tell me to bite on a habanero for a dallor, you must be CRAZY!!!!! (maybe $20)

PS

this coming season i'm planting ROCOTOS, hope it works out fine, and tell people that it's a miniature APPLE. LOL hahahhaHAHAHHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA (coughing)

willard3 is right, jerked meats are an excellent use of habs.

After reading the jerk meat suggestions and looking at a few recipes, I was hit by deja vu. There was something familiar there. I then looked up info on a Yacatecan dish called Cochinita Pibil. Sure enough, the sauces (although they vary from cook to cook) are basically the same. Most include habaneros, garlic, allspice, citrus juice, paprika, thyme and other spices. The main difference is that jerk meats are grilled and Cochinita Pibil is steamed or braised (most authentically pit barbecued). Yucatan is a Caribean part of Mexico, so this is not a surprise. Good eating ahead!

Thanks for all the ideas, everyone. I will use several of them. Got more?

Jim

Today I will make a double batch of gumbo (3 lbs. chicken, 1 lb. of sausage, 2 lg. cans of tomatoes, proportional amounts of onion, carrot, bell pepper, stock, roux, etc.) for consumption by various family members, all of whom I think will like a moderate level of heat.

I have three orange habaneros on hand. How many can I use?

Jim

I'm considering using some for filling. Cut in half through stem and fill with cream cheese, ham, and some other stuff and bake em a little. I can find the recipe if anyone wants. It's on this forum somewhere under "what to do with them all" or "too many jals". Something like that.

I do it with jals, it just dawned on me to try it with habs.

They are also good sliced fresh and dipped in lime juice and then salt. I do this with my Chocolate Habs. Good eating. terrible gas pains later tho.

Haha, ya. But they are so tasty.

Jimster...how many did you end up using? Could you handle it?

Kristiina

I just picked up a yellow hab. Are they more mild than the orange?

By the time I made the gumbo, a half had been used on a burger, so I went ahead and put two and a half habs in six quarts of gumbo. It was not enough for even the delicate palates, so I had to add some stuff from the spice cupboard to spice it up.

I'm inexperienced with habs, so can't answer your question about different types. The store had dark green ones as well as orange. Would those have been hotter or milder?

Jim

jimster, you'll find peppers are very miserly with their heat in soups.

in order to get the flavor out of the pepper into your soup take a cup of broth off the top, and the peppers you want to use, place them in a blender and liquify to release the flavor.

you should have satisfactory results with this method.

the best way though is to dehydrate all your surplus and reduce to powder, then add powder to achieve the desired heat level.

jimster, green habs are not as hot as orange. The yellow ones were prolly on their way to turning orange. Habs (as with most peppers) are hotter when you harvest them ripe from the plant.

HabBob, when i said that i had picked up a yellow hab, i ment the plant, not the pepper. Sorry i didn't clerify. I was at home depot getting a gardening itch and on a whim i bought a few plants that had been started for me. 1 broccoli, 2 strawberry and 1 yellow hab. I know that i've heard many of you talk about the orange and red but i had never heard mention of the yellow. of course my curiosity got the best of me (that's usually how i end up getting in trouble! haha). In my inexperienced hot pepper mind, yellow would be hot, orange would be hotter, and red would be hotest. is this true? could this be a generalization for most peppers?

kristiina

I spent a summer once in Kingston Jamaica. A lady I knew made 'pumpkin soup' (squash and pigs' tails). She put a whole uncut Scotch Bonnet pepper (roughly similar I think to a Habenero). She tied a string to the stem so that after a few hours of simmering she could take it out. She told me that she used the peppers a lot like that, but if it broke you would have to throw the soup out as it would kill you. Joe

Kristina,

FYI, a yellow habanero can easily be as hot or much hotter than Red or Orange varieties. They are all hot, but heat varies of course by specific varieties.

Chris

"I spent a summer once in Kingston Jamaica. A lady I knew made 'pumpkin soup' (squash and pigs' tails). She put a whole uncut Scotch Bonnet pepper (roughly similar I think to a Habenero). She tied a string to the stem so that after a few hours of simmering she could take it out. She told me that she used the peppers a lot like that, but if it broke you would have to throw the soup out as it would kill you. Joe"

haha, that lady was certainly NOT a chilehead! She'd be better suited cutting a jalapeno in half and not worrying about it, even then it'd be even spicier than boiling an uncut SB.

i work with a carribean lady who said scotch bonnets were really hot, and I could have one but to be careful with it because it would give me blisters, i ate it raw in front of her with a dash of salt lol.

just because they're from the carribean doesn't mean they actually like spicy food!

Make some pepper jelly I love the taste of something sweet followed by a kick to the taste buds from the heat of peppers. Habs are perfect cuse they got that fruity taste.

Habanero Brownies they are awesome but not real hot. Tastes like a bownie on the tip of tongue but the heat hits in the back of the mouth but not of a habanero level by any measure. Here is the link to the receipt http://www.completerecipes.com/54930.htm . I used a whole habanero instead of the habanero sauce. Careful when pureeing the peppers the smell will make you sneeze among other things. Could have had lots of fun with these in my younger days when a group of us got a sweets urge while in a "smoke " filled room. Happy New Years and great harvests to all

"In my inexperienced hot pepper mind, yellow would be hot, orange would be hotter, and red would be hotest. is this true? could this be a generalization for most peppers?"

Chris is correct, there is a strain of yellow hab floating around (acquired by www.peppermania.com and seed for it is sold on the site) that is brutal. I was so happy to see a ripe pod in my garden that I plucked it and took a bite-yikes!

My intuition tells me that the one you picked up may not be the same strain as the one sold on peppermania. The one sold on peppermania is large and blocky, almost like a strain called a madame jeanette. Pictures of other yellow habs I have seen have more of 'pumpkin' shape. Peppermania's is probably a freak.

Other strains of yellow hab may not be as bad. The hottest pepper I have ever had was red (trinidad scorpion) and there are other peppers, the trinidad 7-pod and USDA datil, reputed to be two of the worlds hottest, with red pods. As far as strictly habs, I found the plain red habs to be the least hot out of red, orange and that mutant yellow thing.

There are different red habs too, red hab, red savina, red dominica, caribbean red, etc yada yada.

The heat level can vary from fruit to fruit on the same plant too, it's pretty bizarre but it happens.

The one color that consistently spells danger is chocolate though. Chocolate habs have always been the hottest of the strictly hab varieties and chocolate colored Capsicum chinenses are usually regarded as hellish. I bit into a small piece of a chocolate scotch bonnet this year and felt like my brain was going to cook-good times!

I have a thread on here-'review of peppers grown, 2005', there are a bunch of peppers on there I grew and reviewed. If you're curious about habs and colors, heat levels, etc, almost everything I grew this year was an habanero variety. Check it out. I think I wrote it back in October.

Mark

thanks mark. Good looking out! It was so nice of you to take the time to review everything you grew. It's that kind of selflessness that helps out all the newbies like me. Until I can recite name, heat level and flavor of MOST peppers, I will consider myself a newbie. Thanks

Here's a great habanero recipe site:

Here is a link that might be useful: Habanero Recipes

1. Buy one gallon jar of Mt. Olive Kosher Dills.
2. Pour out one cup of juice and mix in blender with 3 habaneros.
3. Bring 2. to boil.
4. Add back to pickle jar and put lid back on.
5. Age in refrigerator for 2 months.

These pickles will have a slow burn. The first bite will have no heat. The last bite will make you cry.

snip
The one color that consistently spells danger is chocolate though.
snip

Chilacas are a very nice chocolate brown and they are not very picante.....

llst year I made a few thing with my habs.

these two were my favorite:

take a melon scooper, skinny plastic thing with small teeth on it for scooping out stuff, and scoop out all the seeds n center of the habs (I suppose a spoon would work as well) and dry that out and crush or blender it to make an estremely hot seasoning (one shake can add some killer heat) to add a little or a big zip to any meal. I added a small amount of Garlic and Onion to it for a small amount of flavor.

I then took the rest of the pepper and chopped them up very fine and placed in a bowl. I then added Rice Viniger just enough to cover the peppers. I let them soak for two weeks in the fridge. I then took the soaked peppers and drained out the rest of the viniger (wasn't much aboot a teaspoon amount left) and dried them from there in a dehydrator. It came out soooo tastey good, I also added a small amount of garlic, onion and a very small amount of sea salt. It was like a hot sauce seasoning! Highly recomended if you have enough peppers to try it out.

"Chilacas are a very nice chocolate brown and they are not very picante....."

Chilacas are not Capsicum chinense, which is the species that I was referring to.

If you would like to argue my point though, you may want to point out that the Aji Brown is considered by many a Capsicum chinense, although it is also commonly classified as a baccatum. Should it turn out to be a chinense, you have just successfully proven me wrong with a little help from me.

I grow red savina's for therapy, but I have put it in brownies and taken them to work. Used to have a problem with people touching things that didnt belong to them.

hafarms great idea but try chocolate covered habs they look JUST like the chocolate covered cherries i usually keep at my desk and every now and then some go missing so i got annoyed and covered some of the smaller caribbean reds with chocolate and put them in the same box as the cherries come in sure enough a few went missing :) since then nothing has been taken off my desk without me being asked first

ROTFLMAO!!!!

Jim

You guys are mean :) but, I am sure you served milk after your "treats"...

In my short term of using orange store bought habs, I have found pureed with sour cream hides none of the flavor and mellows the heat too. Pureed orange and hab was a great combo. Tonight it was 4 nectarines, 5 habs. a little salt and rice vinegar. It is aging now. I have read the sugars in fresh fruit also mellows the heat.

Sorry I've come late to this post but here is a link to the recipe which converted me to Habaneros! The recipe calls for fresh Habs but I used dried ones (reconstituted). The Habanero-Lime Butter is to die for!
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Grilled-Salmon-with-Habanero-Lime-Butter/Detail.aspx