You can grow an Anaheim type pepper to get the milder flavor. Some varieties of Anaheims measure around 500 Scoville heat units while others can go as high as 2500 SHUs. You'd just have to research varieties and figure out how many SHUs a given variety tends to have, and select accordingly to how mild or moderate you want the heat to be. Often you can just type in the variety name of the pepper and the phrase 'Scoville heat units' into a search engine and get the general SHU rating for that variety. In this case, since you want a milder Anaheim, I'd grow one of the California anaheims. New Mexico anaheim varieties tend to be at the hotter end of the scale. You also might like some of the poblano types (aka anchos when dried).

I'd suggest you start by looking at the Scoville heat unit chart linked below. The first thing to figure out is what level of SHUs is too hot for you. In general, I don't like most peppers that go higher than 10,000 SHUS if we're talking about eating peppers themselves....like stuffed jalapenos for example. I can handle smaller bits of much hotter peppers, though, when used in cooking. Hence, while I'll never ever again eat a habanero fresh (I have done it in the past, albeit not on purpose), I love them when I use a relatively small amount of habanero in Habanero Gold jelly. Many of the peppers, like cayennes and tabascos, that we grow to use in making fermented pepper sauce, to dry and grind into a flake, or to use to make pepper-flavored oils or vinegars, have a wide range of SHUs and all of them are probably hotter at maturity than I'd eat fresh, but I use them in small quantities in cooking.

Scoville Heat Unit Chart

Many of the women I know are happier with peppers in the 2500-3500 SHU range at max. I used to be like that, but the ability to tolerate higher SHUs develops as you eat hotter peppers. So, once I could tolerate peppers around 3500 SHUs, I started eating slightly hotter ones. By the time I had worked my way up to 8000-10,000 SHUs, I felt like that was about as much heat as I ever want to eat in quantity. With the spice peppers that come in at, let's say, 30,000-50,000 SHUs, I like them only in very small quantities to add heat to foods I make from scratch.

For what it is worth, I think that the popular McIlhenny Tabasco Sauce usually is in the 7,000-8,000 SHU range, so if it is too hot for you, you probably want to stick with peppers that have SHUs below that number of, if you use peppers with a higher SHU, use them in small quantities only.

No matter which pepper you choose, if it has any heat at all, then the growing conditions also influence how hot those peppers will be in any given year. In general, peppers grown in drier, hotter conditions will develop a hotter flavor than those grown in milder, wetter conditions. Sometimes in a hot, drought year, some of the jalapeno peppers I adore to eat whole in a cool, wet year just get too, too hot for me. Also, harvesting them green gives a milder flavor than harvesting them when they reach their full, mature color. When processing peppers, a lot of the heat is found in the white fleshy ribs inside. If you cut that away and dispose of it, you remove a certain amount of the heat.

I've linked a good, basic recipe for homemade chili powder below. You would control the heat by how much cayenne and paprika you add. Without the cayenne and paprika, it really isn't chili powder, so to get one that your taste buds like, you just reduce the quantity of the two peppers and don't remove them completely. To customize this chili powder to suit your taste buds, start out with 1/4 the amount of paprika and cayenne specified and taste. Not hot enough? Add more of each. Once you're reaching the heat level you like, stop and make a note of how much cayenne and paprika you used and make that your new basic recipe.

Chili Powder Recipe

Many spices produce a bitter aftertaste, so it would be hard to guess which ingredient in any Cajun seasoning mix is producing the bitterness you are tasting. Since everyone's taste buds are different, I might taste the same Cajun mix and not perceive any bitterness, or my taste buds might perceive more bitterness than yours do. The only way I know to work around it is to either try different Cajun seasoning mixes until you find one you like, or to make your own and experiment with varying levels of each spice or seasoning in it until you get it the way you like it. To make things more complicate, our taste buds change as we age, so even a spice blend you once loved can lose its appeal as you get older.

Sometimes we make our own, sometimes we use a commercial mix. The last few years we have become quite partial to locally-produced spice mixes and seasoning blends sold at a German grocery store in Muenster, TX, which is our source for locally-raised and locally-slaughtered beef. We also really like their marinades and sauce mixes. It is hard for me to buy and use any of the seasoning blends sold in regular grocery stores now because we like the ones from Fischer's so much. We only go there about once a month and load up on meat, cheese, butter and their spices/seasonings, so I am careful to keep a shopping list of what I want/need so I don't forget anything. Before we started using theirs, I tended to buy bulk spices from Pendery's and mix up my own blends.

Thank you Dawn. For some reason I thought the ancho peppers were habanaro. I see that there are a lot of milder hot pepper options out there. I have to grow jalapenos for DH and DD. I have one pot with a cayenne in it. I have Czechoslovakian Black, which is about like a jalapeno and is pretty in salsa. I'm actually growing a Chimayo, too (free gift from a seed purchase). I think I will dry some of each of these and see what I get. Then next year try some of the Aneheims or Poblanos. I would like to see if I can make chilli powder.

I used to eat hot stuff when I was young, but now, not only does it overpower the other flavors on my tongue, but my stomach can't handle it. DH really liked cajun seasoning, I really hate it. Just another bump in the road. Fortunately he has moved on to a couple of other seasoning blends that we all like. (homemade beer can chicken seasoning makes any chicken better, and 4-3-2-1 which is 4 parts salt. 3 parts brown sugar, 2 part paprika and 1 part cayenne - which I didn't realize was in it till now. We like this on pork.)

Dawn-side note-Fischers is awesome. The meat and cheese selection is wonderful. And the route we take is a decent scenic drive once you cross into TX.

Amy, You're welcome. I bet I've grown at least 200 hot pepper varieties since moving here and it has been a lot of fun to discover different sorts of pepper flavor and heat. During that time, while I have found many personal favorites, I've never lost the desire to try yet more new ones. I guess I never will stop looking for something new and different to grow.

Now, I'll apologize in advance for hijacking this thread.......sorry, sorry, sorry, but I have to talk to Scott about Fischer's!

Scott, Oh my! Another Fischer's fan! We love, love, love it. It is almost embarrassing how much meat and cheese we load up on while we are in there, and I love their huge array of spice mixes, steak sauces, marinades, rubs, seasoning blends, dressings, etc. Oh, and the sauerkraut. The jerky! The trail mix blends. And do I even have to mention the kolaches? The strudels? I'm not really an impulse shopper, tending to shop with a list and stick to it, except when we are in Fischer's. When I step inside that store I just want to buy one of everything in the meat and cheese case. It has ruined us for beef from any other source because nothing else comes close. I'd much rather have Fischer's hot dogs than Ballpark Franks! Of course, since you shop there, I know that you already know all that. Let's not tell anyone else about Fischer's and we'll just let it be our little secret. OK?

We take a scenic route too. Sometimes we go to Fischer's from Gainesville on Hwy 82, and sometimes we drive west out of Marietta on Hwy 32 and go there that way. Then, we drive home on a different route so it is scenic all the way. There is a little part of me that feels like I am going home when I go there. My dad was born and grew up at Spanish Fort (which now is virtually a ghost town), and we went back there for the Spanish Fort Homecoming (a community homecoming and cemetery cleanup day, not a football type) quite often. I guess I haven't been there since the 1990s, not for a homecoming. We often went to Nocona for family reunions in the 1960s and 1970s, and I just love St. Jo. If I didn't live here south of Marietta, I'd live in or near St. Jo. or Muenster. If we lived any closer to Fisher's than we do, we'd shop only there and nowhere else. I am obsessed with that store, and now that I have discovered KerryGold butter, it is the only butter I buy.

Needless to say, when we are celebrating a family birthday or other special occasion (Mother's Day, Father's Day, our anniversary, just any excuse will do....), it has to be with steaks cooked outdoors on the grill, and the steaks have to be from Fischer's. Nothing else will do. So much of the meat available in stores nowadays looks like meat but doesn't taste like the meat I remember from my youth. Well, at Fischer's the beef tastes like beef and the chicken tastes like chicken and all is well with the world.

It pleases me further when I walk in there on a summer day and they have locally-grown produce piled up in boxes in the middle of the aisle. That is just a bonus. I try to make it a point to buy some of that locally-grown produce, even if we have exactly the same produce at home fresh from our garden. When there is a store that takes the time to source and sell locally grown anything, I always want to support them by buying it.

I'm just enough of a city girl still (and a lover of living white-tailed deer) that I feel a little squeamish in deer season when the hunters are rolling in with their deer to be processed there at the facility at the back of the store, but then I realize that at least they respect the deer they've harvested enough to take them to the best processor, so I get over it.

If I ever disappear from this forum and y'all are wondering what has become of me, look for me in Fischer's. I'll be in there meticulously selecting one package of every single meat and cheese they have in their line, and I might get lost and just forget to ever leave the store.

Dawn

Thanks, Amy. Because of you I just HAD to make chili tonight. Turned into goulash, really. I was limited to certain peppers. Still good. ha

George, Those are pretty yellow peppers. I've grown the yellow Fatali pepper several times before though not in several years, and also really like to grow yellow squash peppers. Both are exceptionally hot, but that Aji Yellow #2 may be even hotter than they are. I can only eat and cook with tiny amount of peppers that are exceptionally hot, and mostly just stick to Habaneros nowadays since I use them to make Habanero Gold jelly.

The first time I grew Tabasco peppers, I was shocked by how hot they were. They're not the kind of pepper you casually munch on while working in the garden---and I learned that the hard way.

Dawn

I read somewhere that the Aji Yellow #2 is about 1/10th as hot as a regular Habanero. But I can't tell. It's hot. I do like the fruity flavor though. I once grew Fatalli, by mistake. When I tasted it I about fainted. That's a lot hotter. The Tabasco is alright in tiny nibbles.

George

Fatali is incredibly hot, so I only use it in recipes where I can put just a teeny-tiny amount of pepper in it. So, from a harvest of dozens of Fatali pepers a year, I only use one or two. That's one of the reason I stopped growing it. You cannot even give away Fatali peppers because once people have gotten too much of a Fatali pepper once, they never want them again.

I really only grow Tabasco in order to make Tabasco sauce. Even tiny nibbles are too hot for me. You must have a cast iron stomach.

The little cans of Green Chili Peppers that are bought at the store are Anaheim type peppers. I like the Joe E. Parker peppers as they have a very good taste and are not hot, they are like the Anaheim peppers. I think they are probably the same pepper so either one would work.

Thanks Auther.

Chili Powder,

I think you could make chili powder from dried Pablano peppers and dried Anaheim's with some ground cumin, garlic powder & oregano with a little paprika powder. Then if you needed a little heat you could throw in a seeded jalapeno. I don't like hot chili I'm in favor of a milder kind. I like McCormick's Chili powder alright but I bet home made chili powder would taste better as it would be fresher. You can find chili recipes on the internet. I also like crackers or cornbread crumbled in mine.

Just gettin back to reading this. We need a fischers forum for those who don't know it. I learned early on to take money when I go there. Just a warning. The first time you go take lots of money. You will want to buy everything! In fact, just don't go. Leave it for me and Dawn! Well, come to think of it they might have enough smoked habanero jack and cheesy pepper summer sausage with fresh crackers for everyone. Maybe. As long as I stay home there will be plenty for ya'll!

oh and Dawn I am familiar with all those towns except Spanish Fort. I will check that one out next time.

Amy, I don't know what I'm doing. But I'm growing Dawn's Paprika peppers. It's a great grower but they take a long time to turn. SO I've minced them up and added them to chili while they're yellow. OMG OMG OMG You gotta try them.

I tried black hungarian and also Jimmy Nardellos in chili. Just wasn't feeling it. Nardellos, good for stir fry. But fresh paprika and a touch of roasted cayenne with store-bought cumin, fresh garlic and a touch of green peppers. GOOD.

I have never grown paprika. I guess I will have to do that one next year also. Geez I need a bigger garden. It's funny I grind my own hot pepper powder blends and chili powder blends. They are so much better. But I am not a fan of store bought paprika powder. So it never crossed my mind. But it is probably better grown at home like most everything else.

I grew Anaheims a few years ago and they were mostly very mild until WHAM! ...there would be a spicy one! Usually after I'd promised a guest that no, there wasn't anything hot in that salsa/guacamole.

Kate, Anaheims come in both mild and spicy varieties. Maybe one of your plants was of the spicy variety? When I grow both mild and hot Anaheims, I plant them as far apart as I can (so I don't mix up the two varieties in one bowl when harvesting) and I try to keep them separate in the kitchen by storing them in labeled bags so any person preparing food can tell if they are getting a mild one or a spicy one.....and, still, sometimes, somehow a spicy one ends up being mistaken for a mild one. The same thing has happened with milder/hotter jalapenos and with the mild/super ridiculously hot habaneros. I don't even grow the milder habanero look-alikes any more because it seems impossible to keep from mixing up the two types together despite my best effort to keep them separate.

Scott, Spanish Fort is about a mile south of the river on St. Hwy 103. It is north of St. Jo and is in Montague County. If you blink when you drive through it, you'll miss it. There never was a Spanish fort there, but the Tayovayas Indians had a fortified village there, where they and the Comanches defeated the Spanish troops in....hmmmm.....about the 1750s. Later on in time, archaeologists thought they had found the remains of a Spanish Fort, hence the name, but it really was the remains of the fortified Native American village. Eventually, the Chisholm Trail crossed the river the, making Spanish Fort a really wild town in those years. The last time we visited it, the High School (converted to a community center), a couple of old churches (none of them appeared to be in use) and the cemetery were about all that remained.

I have the image of the general store burned into my mind, but now I don't remember if it was still standing when we last were there. I do remember it from visits in the 1960s and 1970s. There was a photo of it in a book about Texas ghost towns in the 1990s, which really irritated my dad. He never thought of his home town as a ghost town. When I was a kid you still could make out the words on the front of the store that said something like "Spanish Fort Coon Hunters Assn Meets Here Monthly". Nowadays, though, there are homes sprouting here and there around Spanish Fort as people retiring/fleeing from the big cities buy a few acres and retire to the country. It might be the population there is on the upward trend. Or, at least, it isn't declining as quickly. The next time we go to Fischer's I think we'll swing northward and see what is left of Spanish Fort.

Dawn

The Old Store At Spanish Fort

Scott if you plan on drying and grinding, you'll need quite a few plants. They like to take their sweet loving' time to turn red.

Good read, Dawn. I am keeping that.

CC-trust me, I will plant enough! I always plant to many peppers.

Scott, If you like reading about the frontier history of SW OK and some portions of TX, there's a great book about the Comanche Nation in general, and specifically focused on Chief Quannah Parker, that includes a great description of the history of Spanish Fort. It is called "Empire of the Summer Moon...." and its author is S. C. Gwynne. I read it because I wanted to know more about Quannah Parker, and was surprised at how much I learned about the Commanche's efforts to save their territory from the encroaching white settlers. The book is both horrifying and fascinating as it follows the Commanches all the way to the TX Gulf Coast and then back across the staked plains of Texas and into Oklahoma, where they ultimately settled in the area near Lawton. It breaks my heart to read of the constant conflict and killings between the Native Americans and the encroaching white settlers. Nothing we ever studied in school made history come alive for me like this book. Maybe this book resonates so much with me now that I am older because I have traveled extensively through the parts of TX and OK covered by the book, and live along the TX/OK border now. When I was a kid, this topic was taught, of course, from the point of view of the pioneers/settlers and, when it came to the Parker part of history, the focus was mostly on Quannah's mother, a white captive child named Cynthia Ann Parker, who lived with the Commanches for many years before being "saved" and brought back to her white pioneer family. As I recall, our history books made it sound so heroic that someone found her, saved her, and brought her home. Having now read more about her, I know that she always wanted to return to "her people" the Commanches and never found much happiness living back among the whites. She did, in fact, try often to 'escape' from her white family and community to return to the Commanches, but never was successful.

I also remember, as a child, hearing a big, full moon referred to as a "Commanche Moon" without ever really understanding exactly why. Well, I understand it now.

As for peppers, I always grow too many. That's why I have so many ways to preserve them. (grin) I harvest, harvest, harvest, and we eat, eat, eat and preserve, preserve, preserve until we are sick of them, and then I yank out the plants when I get tired of dealing with them. Even more so than tomatoes, peppers give a huge return on the square footage used to grow them. That's one of the things I like best about peppers. They almost never stop producing (except in insane heat where you're over 105 degrees daily), nothing in my garden ever kills them, and the versatile peppers can be used about 1,000,001 different ways. I bet I have 80 pepper plants in my garden now, although at least 20 or 30 of them are ornamental. Ornamental peppers are also edible but so hot that I don't use them for much unless I want to make a very hot pepper-flavored oil or vinegar. Of course, we are teetering on the edge between Moderate and Severe Drought and I stopped watering my garden either at the end of August or the beginning of September and everything looks horrible. I am amazed everything is mostly still alive. I have pepper plants covered with fruit and I may take advantage of this cool day to harvest some. It depends on the copperheads.

My neighborhood has had a lot of copperheads out and about for the last 7-10 days and a friend of mine narrowly avoiding being bitten by one that was wrapped around his outside water faucet. We killed one in the driveway at 4 a.m. Tuesday and have had to be especially cautious these last few days as the snakes are coming to the pavement and gravel late in the day/overnight/early in the morning to soak up some of the heat. If I could be positive my garden was snake-free, I'd spend all of today out there doing some garden cleanup. October is a hard month in the sense that the weather is fine and I want to be out in the garden all the time, but the snakes are really active as they prepare to hibernate so I see them far too often. I have to be careful to balance my desire to spend entire days in the garden with the knowledge that the snakes are in there too. Every time I try to do garden clean-up I find a snake skin, and that keeps me on edge.

Dawn

Well, since the chickens decided they liked paprika peppers I brought in a bunch of yellow ones I am hoping will turn. I have a couple of red ones I have decided to freeze until the others catch up. Then I will try smoking them and dehydrating. I'm sure they would be better fresh, but it's not going to happen. I have never bought smoked paprika, but it sounds good. The chickens are fenced out now. I hope I get new peppers before freeze, though that bed is supposed to have fall brassica eventually. There is a good crop of Anneheims coming on, and one pablono plant with a few peppers.

I went out and bought a pablono and a bell pepper plant this spring because my pepper seedlings looked sickly and I didn't think they were going to make it. The store bought plants are only now starting to flower (they went in the ground first). My sickly seedlings are going like gangbusters. Even the ones still in solo cups I didn't have room for and can't bring myself to throw away have little peppers on them.

Do you have a place now that you could transplant the little plants in Solo cups? It seems like they've survived so long in the cups that surely they have earned a chance to grow in the ground and produce many peppers for you before the first freeze. There's still tons of growing time left.

About the best I could do is pots. It's funny, I had sprouted ginger that I planted. Then it died. So I stuck a dwarf tomato in that pot. Today I noticed the ginger is growing again. I must not have been watering enough before.

I went looking for Anneheim peppers to pickle. I saw some over the weekend...in more than one store. So I went to the produce stand. It's gone. Packed up for the season. Went to Reasors. They had hatch, but that wasn't what I wanted. Sprouts. .99 a piece and they didn't look that good. Tomorrow I may go to carmichaels. I couldn't find pickling cukes either. Maybe best. We know how I love cooking. I tried making empanadas tonight. I got this cute toy from Weston. Ravioli maker It was NOT pretty. I attempted 4 and rolled the rest of the filling into tortillas, which insisted on sticking together. Glad I'm not pickling tonight.

I have a buddy on facebook that lives off fishing and hunting squirrel. And gardening. Peppers. He is one who would openly and readily taste-test the scorpion peppers. He grows a lot of peppers. All habajeros. Then, he takes them all and combines them, ferments them, bottles them and sells some of them. (He even paints his own fishing lures and sells them on ebay.)

That boy makes me tired just watching his posts !

But earlier this year he harvested paprika and smoked it and ground it. Dang! I've been waiting to do that for years. I need to get my act up to snuff!

And turkey. I forgot, he hunts turkey when he can. Sells all the pelts from squirrels, raccoons, skunks.. whatever. I didn't know that was still possible!

don't worry. He's a responsible hunter, too. Hunts mostly squirrels.

But he's a serious pepper connoisseur. I often wonder if he could even taste something on the scale beneath a habanjero.

Sorry, but my point is about the smoked paprika. I hear it is stupendous and outrageously delicious to cook with.

You may not be interested in this but one year I pulled all my cayenne pepper plants and hung them in the shed and let them completely dry out and then picked the dry peppers off and ground them up in a food processor until they were almost dust and put them in a quart jar and used them hot pepper flakes to season food. They were really good. Another time I boiled red cayenne peppers then ran them through a food mill and made hot sauce out of them, I liked it better than store bought it had more flavor.

Bon, I'm really disappointed the chickens took a liking to the paprikas. Maybe I will get enough yet.

Authereray, always interested. In 2013 cayennes were the experiment. I read you plant them with tomatoes and the birds will think the tomatoes are spicy and leave them alone. I bought a 6 pack of cayennes, and it was a really good growing season weatherwise. The flaw in what I read was, a) birds are smarter than that b) cayennes, at least in my garden, turn red AFTER tomatoes c) you cannot GIVE cayennes away. I think I still have some of the dried peppers. I made hot sauce. I don't do hot, but DH used it some. Mostly I crumbled them up in the garden beds when the dog wanted to wallow there. I grow one plant each year, but cayenne is not my favorite pepper. This year it's in a pot where it regularly wilts to near death, so I may not get peppers from it.

One of the paprika plants is making new peppers. Brought in a bunch more banana peppers. I HAVE to water, some beds look really bad.

The hot sauce that I made wasn't real hot, but tasted good. I don't like real hot either but I have also made jelly with red cayenne peppers (just the juice) which was quite a surprise in how fruity it taste and low heat. I am not an advocate of any real hot stuff. I like the Banana Peppers pickled they go good with about anything. Also try the Joe E. Parker Peppers, I think they have a little more taste than the Banana peppers, I think they are more like the Hatch type peppers. More of a spicy than hot. When a pepper is to hot I can't enjoy the flavor. I don't care for the Habanero peppers as they are to hot for me.

Auther, I dried some Cayenne the year I grew them. I know why Cayenne is such a hot seller. Those plants are prolific and produce non stop! But I was wondering what the point was because Cayenne is so easy to come by. There must be two cups by way of those little pizza red pepper packets in my frig.

But the home made was fantastic on a whole nuther level, especially when cooking !

Chickencoupe, I agree hole heartedly. The home made just taste better for some reason.

My paprika peppers are round, almost beefsteak tomato shaped (though not that big). Some that I see on line are long and pointed. Does this make a difference? I am drying 3 poblanos (all I had). I bought three red Anneheims to dry and I had 3 in varying colors that are also drying. I have a lot of green Anneheims I am thinking about pickling. Taste wise, both the pablano and the Anneheim are exceptable, but how did I get them on my lips which are burning?

AmyinOwasso, maybe you transferred the capsaicin from the peppers on your fingers. Pablano's & Anaheim's aren't real hot but do have just a little.

I grew three mild peppers this year - we personally love the poblanos in everything from fried potatoes to cornbread. I also grew Cubanelles and they are milder than a jalapeno but we are in LOVE with shishitos. I've had them in restaurants where they blister them and sprinkle with sea salt and you can eat them just like that! They have very thin skins and a lovely flavor and are very mild. They say 1/10 are hot but we haven't had a too hot one yet. We will plant those every year now and lots of them! Also I tried Asian Five Pepper this year and am just getting my first pepper - it's purple. They look like jalapenos but are very pretty as the peppers are red, yellow and purple and the flavor is supposed to be fantastic.

I have heard that one Shishito might not be hot at all and the next might have a some heat, I would like to try them. I really like fried potatoes with onions and peppers. I also like what is called Texas Toothpicks, where they slice Jalapeno's long ways into strips then batter and fry them.

I've put shishitos on my things to try list. Though I would be dissappointed to come across a really hot one. I put sweet banana peppers in our salad Saturday and it turned out they were hot. Too hot to eat that way.

I cutback one of my out of control Sungold tomatoe plants and there was this little peper plant just loaded with bell peppers. I forgot it was in there and no way you could see it. I guess it got enough light to make peppers. I was pleasantly surprised. I picked 12 nice size bells off it this morning. I am going to slice them up and freeze them.

i thought it was a nice Labor Day gift.

I wish my bells would surprise me that way. How funny that it thrived without any attention. I did get 2 very nice, heavy red Anneheims today and the paprikas have doubled in size in the last week.

I usually get the heaviest harvests from bells in mid- to late-autumn as they respond to the cooler fall weather and seem to have some sense of urgency to hurry up and produce a harvest before the cold weather gets them. If summer is all about tomatoes and hot peppers, then fall seems to be all about the sweet peppers, particularly the sweet bells.

Interesting, Dawn. So, could you plant them late and still get a crop or do they need to tease you all summer first?

Mine are in the freezer, in hopes that I'll get enough tomatoes to make salsa for Christmas gifts. If not, I'll get some at the farmers market in a couple weeks.

Anyone ever grown pimento peppers? I'd like to can them to use for pimento cheese, in chicken salad, stuff like that.

Amy, I always plant sweet bells in Spring but you probably could plant in mid-summer for fall. I haven't tried that. I'd rather have the sweet bell plants large, mature and ready to explode into a riot of blooms as soon as the Autumn weather cools off to the appropriate level. I've always felt like bells planted at mid-summer might not be as large or bear as heavily as those planted in Spring.

Katie, You can make the famous Garden Web/Harvest Forum recipe for "Annie's Salsa" with ReaLemon or ReaLime juice substituted for the vinegar. Sometimes I make it with 1/3 vinegar, 1/3 ReaLemon, 1/3 ReaLime, but you can use either vinegar, ReaLemon or ReaLime or any combination thereof as long as you use the proper amount. It is an approved substitution for that specfic recipe. The reason ReaLemon and ReaLime are specifically listed is because they consistently test at the proper pH for use as a vinegar substitute in canning, while store brands of lemon and lime juice often test at a lower pH that would make them unsafe to use as a vinegar substitute.

Here's a thread with the Annie's Salsa recipe that includes Malna's notes, including the note about using bottled lemon or lime juice. I don't remember if this thread has the explanation about ReaLemon or ReaLime being the approved bottled substitute or if that is in another Annie's Salsa recipe thread (as there are many, many threads about this very popular salsa). I can at least 200 jars of Annie's Salsa a year, and never make it with 100% vinegar, now that we know we can use bottle ReaLemon and ReaLime. We give it away as Christmas presents and our friends beg for more of it year-round. Yes, it is that good!

Annie's Salsa Recipe and Notes

I also roast and freeze tons of peppers, especially jalapenos, to use in cooking in the non-gardening season when I don't have fresh peppers.

Rebecca, I grow pimentoes every now and then, but not really often. A few pimentoes go a long way at our house.

Dawn

OkieDawn - I have wondered if the acidity from lime juice would work for canning and think i'd MUCH prefer that! Thank you for the link!

Lime is like garlic, it makes every thing better.

Katie, You're welcome. We've always thought the original Annie's Salsa was the best salsa recipe for home-canning (i.e. it was "almost perfect"), but it still did have the vinegar flavor that all approved canning recipes for home-made salsa had. Then, they came out with the approved substitution of ReaLemon and ReaLime and Annie's Salsa went from being almost perfect to perfect.

Amy, I agree.

Garlic and lime can fix just about any savory recipe that is a little off and needs something.

Dawn

I can't wait to try it Dawn! I wonder if all lime would be too much?