I like peppers but not as hot as jalapeño type. It seems the one I grow is not on your list of rating, and it’s mildly hot. Lost the tag so don’t know the name.

I dug these little ones from the ground into pots to overwinter inside. The peppers are green purple now but they will turn red.

Pretty, but something is eating the leaves.

Chile peppers are a flavoring just like so many others. A little is positive, a bit of heat is a plus. Too much of anything is just that to me, too much.

I request food in various types of Mexican and Asian restaurants be medium hot. Enough but not too much. In many Mexican places, they have various kinds of mild to hot salsas and you make it to your own preference.

I do, but not ridiculously hot ones. I like the ones are mildly hot, enough kick to add interest and some heat but not so much so that my mouth is tingling. I like jalapenos and serranos. I have some sort of dried chiles on hand for those recipes that need a hot pepper and I don't have a fresh one on hand, but I'm careful on how much I use because they're pretty hot (to me). One time when ghost peppers were all the rage, I put one -- ONE- in a big pot of chili and that chili was bordering on being too hot to be enjoyable. Yea, no, not for me.

Petalique, they are pest free so far as I have them in the pots but the leaves something munched on them when they were growing along the tomato vines, maybe from grasshoppers or crickets?

This pass summer we drove to VA/DC area and tried Pho and the slices of red peppers they had along with the noodle soup were something! I asked then they showed me the actual pepper that was red, long and narrow maybe 3” long. Probably some Asian variety.

Talking about chile peppers reminds me of something physiological that happens to me that makes me wonder if my reaction is a reason why some people eat hot food.

I think almost all ethnic and cultural cuisine types that feature spicy hot food originate from areas with hot weather. When I eat food that's more than a little hot, my head starts to perspire. Oftentimes, a lot. I wonder if that reaction is common? I describe it as "the sprinklers just went off" and we laugh about it.

In hot weather, it's for sure cooling to have a damp head. Is that part of the reason why hot, spicy food is common with some peoples who live where it's hot?

"When I eat food that's more than a little hot, my head starts to perspire."

That happens to DH. And he's bald so it's extra-obvious. He's a little self-conscious about it but usually is able to laugh it off and enjoy his food in spite of the sweat beading up and starting to drip down his forehead. A quick swipe with a napkin takes care of it. LOL!

Palisades, perhaps they were Thai bird’s eye chilies. I use them fairly often.

➡️ https://www.thespruceeats.com/thai-bird-eye-chili-facts-and-substitutions-3217054

I only use a few at a time, but they are sold in a bag of about .5 to 1 pound.

They have a lovely perfume, quite hot.

That’s it!

You can sow the collected seed from these as well as the dried Chinese ”Facing Heaven” chilies. I grew the later and gave the plant to my Asian doctor. Very easy to grow, and cheap to buy.

Most of the heat is in the membranes & seeds.

I’m going to grow the Thai variety next season.

Different peppers actually taste different aside from their heat. I use chile de arbols in my cooking but I will just use less of them so the heat is not overwhelming. Same with habaneros, I can up a pineapple habanero salsa and use fewer habaneros. Texas A&M bred a milder jalapeno years ago and I will buy some of the milder type when making tacos etc.

I like spicy, just not extremely spicy.

Having lived here in New Mexico for so long, my ability to handle hotter chiles has definitely increased. But, I find that what I enjoy most is just mildly spicy foods. I enjoy a little zing, but even more so, the mix of flavors. I always keep green chile, red chile and various salsas to cook with here because I truly love all sorts of New Mexican/Mexican foods.

Those were serranos I bought. Oops. Twice as hot as Fresno.

Love Thai food, love my spicy Thai chilis.

In my younger days I didn't enjoy spicy food. I remember telling my parents food wasn't supposed to hurt. 😄 Taste buds change as one ages and I love some heat now.

No, I don't like "spicy hot" foods.

Very mild for me. I can’t even cut a single jalapeño without gloves. If not, my fingertips feel like they’ve been burned. OTOH, the hotter the better for DH.🤯

Probably middle of the road, or slightly hotter. I can handle pretty much anything Mexican. I think a very important component of finding our culinary preferences is finding the hot sauce with which we can have a long term relationship. I've found mine in PicoPica. The perfect flavor/heat for me. We go back many years now. I love the habanero flavor as well, but I dislike Tobasco, as I think it just adds heat, and too vinegary a taste for me. One of my favorite meals is a quesadilla with whatever cheeses and veggies in the fridge with a healthy shot of hot sauce. Quick and easy, and gets the job done.

DH and I like reasonably spicy food, but not ridiculously spicy. I once shared a vindaloo curry and I swear even my eyeballs were sweating. When we were dating, we went to an Indian restaurant and asked for medium spice, but I think the cook forgot the first two or three times he added the chillies because it was like eating battery acid. And a Sczechuan dish we had in Melbourne seemed to be about 90% bird's eye chillies!

I don't like really spicy hot food. Poblano peppers is about as hot as I will go. I love chili rellanos. I don't know if that is true Mexican food or TexMex, but it is a favorite.

I love peppers. Serrano is about the hottest I like straight, but the more intense chiles are usually good in something. Like there used to be this honey habanero mustard which I adored. The flavor of habaneros is amazingly good. Very floral. There's another sauce that I learned about in CF which is sort of a cousin, which is very nice, but it's too hot to use indiscriminately. Not super hot, but watch how much you're using hot. I'm currently working my way through a soft orange cheese which has the word "reaper" on the ingredients, but not "Carolina". I haven't looked up the truth, but that makes me think that "Carolina Reaper" may be a registered name like "Yukon Gold" where you're allowed to grow the same kind of potatoes but not use the name without permission. The cheese is mostly tangy with a prickle of heat, then you get a hint of whoa-that's-hot. :) I use a lot of low heat stuff in or on food, like Pace medium tomato based salsa picante or original Huy Fong (sweet) sriracha. They're not greatly hot and are tasty for slathering. Like a favorite from childhood is to slather sourdough bread with the Pace and broil with good real American cheese on top. Yummy!

In the house now, I have a lot of big jalapeños, which are milder than normal ones, some serranoes, cherry bombs, and maybe one other, though my Jimmy Nardellos died in a stunning refrigerator tragedy--they're some of the best peppers ever! I also have a lot of dried peppers of various types and heat, and some prepared chopped red and green hatch, from Fresh Chile Company that's like a relish, though of chile peppers. And the above sauces, plus proper hot salsa, and TJ's habanero sauce, which is great. It's a thin sauce like Tobasco (which I don't like). Many of the thin hot sauces are too vinegary for me. ETA: Yes, I can make my own hot sauce, and will do so if I'm making something specific, but I don't can and have nowhere to store the product so will not be taking up canning, and making the good stuff is too fiddly to do just for a bottle in the fridge,

Do you like peppers? Chilies? Mild? Spicy? Fragrant?Do you like peppers? Chilies? Mild? Spicy? Fragrant? Yes.

Same as pillog - yes 🙂

I miss growing my own chiles and sweet peppers. I grew varieties that weren't available in stores here - Mulato Isleno, Pasillo Bajio, and Aji Dulce, along with Chocolate Beauty bell peppers and Corno di Toro in red and yellow. The Mulatos were really sweet when fully ripe and good in salads, once membranes and seeds were removed. I grew jalapeños - and chocolate habaneros as well - a little of those goes a long way with me. Unfortunately, chili thrips put an end to growing peppers a number of years ago

I do like to use chipotle powder and red pepper flakes to season many things. I prefer a subtle heat to mouth on fire.

At my Grannies her family kept a little pepper bush in a pot. It had very small almost round little red peppers from which they made hot pepper sauce. It looked for all the world like a little tree and they passed it around and apparently it would rebloom and make more peppers. I have no idea what kind it was but it was hot enough to set your hair on fire.

I used to enjoy pretty hot stuff but in my old age and living with a husband who cant do very hot food I go for pretty mild these days. I dont like that eating really hot peppers affects your ability to taste other foods.

Peppers are new world and it has been interesting to me that so many cultures adopted them to the point you would think their foods had always been hot. But of course Many Europeans and the English did not for a long time. One has to wonder why

patriciae

“Texas A&M bred a milder jalapeno years ago”

So that was the version I once had in pickle form and wondered if it actually was the real McCoy! The original would break me in profuse sweat all over and a red face.

Japanese food IMO is the least spicy of all. When we dined out in a restaurant in Osaka, a Japanese colleague told me that hot and humid tropical climate could reduce appetite for food so adding hot peppers may help increase appetite and better digestion. Studies point out capsaicin is the active ingredient in chili peppers that has numerous health benefits. I used the OTC capsaicin cream and it did help to relieve the pain.

Just wanted to add I often hear, ”Taste it, it’s not spicy.” It IS spicy to me almost always.

I grew up eating Mexican food as a matter of course. My Mother, who grew up in rural California, in her youth, would eat jalapeños whole. I went to summer school in Mexico when I was in college. To me, hot peppers are normal and desireable, but in moderation. I agree with Patriciae about not blasting the tastebuds with heat, but when they're accustomed to heat, they taste around it up to a higher level on the Scoville scale, I think. My personal dish of guacamole, once, which I'd made for myself, was accosted by a cousin. He was an adventurer, and ate all kinds of things in all parts of the world, but I guess he didn't eat the peppers, because you could see the steam coming out of his ears as his face turned red. It really wasn't particularly hot. Teaches him not to help himself to my lunch. :)

Oh yes - people don't always realize that tolerance for spicy heat is acquired, and you can't accurately judge it by your own. Something I think isn't too spicy can feel a lot stronger to someone else - and vice versa.

Patriciae, that little bush was called Birds Eye Peppers. I don't know the botanical name for it, but I am pretty sure it is the one you are talking about.

I like the flavor of most peppers, but I do not like things that are excessively hot. Food should not hurt.

I also like mildly spicy foods, a bowl of chili makes me sweat and I don't eat jalapeno poppers. This year I grew Anaheim, pasilla and poblano for me, Death Spiral, Dragon's Breath, red Habanero and some Sugar Rush Peach for Elery. I can eat chilies rellenos and some quick pickled Anaheim on a sandwich but that's about the limit for me. Party Music sent me some seeds for something she called "balloon peppers" and I can eat those green but they get hotter when they ripen so a red one is out of the question. Elery, on the other hand, dehydrates the Death Spiral and grinds it to powder to put on his eggs. The Princess calls it "The Dust of Death" as it hits the Scoville scale somewhere around 1,400,000. I won't even pick the darned things and if I try to cut them I sneeze uncontrollably so they are all his!

Annie

We like spicy food, my love likes it hotter than I. But not so much that it overwhelms everything else. Too much black pepper, garlic, or ginger can make for a too spicy dish as much as hot peppers Scoville can.

I've grown a lot of different peppers, from zero to weapons grade hot. And tend to think in scoville because of it. We tend to 40,000-60,000 scoville as the max for regular eating. But sometimes use peppers that can get up to 200,000+ ish for some things where a little goes a long way in a large batch of something. But the sweet spot for seasoning peppers can be more in the 2,000-20,000 range.

For hot sauces we can max out in the 10,000 range but more often stick around the 500-1,500 range.

Thankyou Marilyn, I think you are probably right. I looked that up and saw two versions one long and skinny but the other nice and round and fat with a Scoville rating of 50,000 to 100,000. That certainly sounds about right. They pickled them in vinegar and packed it all in a bottle with a small spout. And yipes.

patriciae

I like moderately spicy (with flavor) but could nor eat an whole hot chili pepper. I am am amazed that some can, one after another. Maybe these people are birds in disguise.

I remember ordering a bowl of spicey pho and almost choked to death — like an asthma attack.

Another time, I ate some simple raita that an Indian woman brought to a potluck — yogurt with red spicy chili pepper pieces here and there. Delicious.

Some while later, I made a duplicate of that raita. Delicious. But after the 2nd bowl I developed a painful bellyache ;)

You reminded me in an opposites way of the "five alarm chili" I ordered in Arizona when I was young. Bland. Not just lack of heat--my mother made a please all chili which had lots of no-heat spices which was delicious as is or one could stir in some cooked peppers. This one at the restaurant must have been aimed at snowbirds who thought "hot" was a shake of pre-ground (i.e., not full flavor) black pepper. I asked the server for hot sauce. Shockingly, that turned out to be Tobasco! I would have expected Tapatio, if common, or at least Cholula, but really? No house or local?

BTW, without thinking about it, yesterday's grab and go fare included Pace (jalapeño tomato salsa) in a sandwich, spicy Mexican soup, pasta arrabiata with some pepper jack cheese, and spiced cucumber salad with cayenne in it. None particularly spicy, but all with some heat. ;)