How the Jalapeño Lost Its Heat

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Brian Reinhart is a food writer.

And when he was growing up in southern Indiana, he remembers that there was a way people talked about one particular cuisine, Mexican food.

The perception I always had, what people told me because they were Midwestern people, was, oh, well, you got to be careful with Mexican food because so much of it is so spicy.

And those peppers, you got to watch out for because they'll light you up every time.

One winter, Brian's family went on vacation to San Antonio, and Brian finally got to eat the real thing.

It was a revelation.

It was December 27th, and we were sitting out on the river walk.

It was 70 degrees outside, and we were calling home saying, Yeah, we're having enchiladas, and we're sitting outside, and there are all these ducks floating across the water, and we're enjoying everything.

And all the people at home were saying, well, there's two feet of snow outside, and we're all miserable.

So we all started lobbying my dad, saying, can you get a job down here?

Brian's family, lured in part by the taste of good Mexican food, moved to Texas when he was in high school.

I moved down the week I turned 16, so then visiting with friends and going out and everything turned into Mexican food or barbecue.

Brian's interest in food grew as he got older, and eventually he began writing about it professionally.

For the past two years, he's been a food critic at Dallas's D Magazine.

He eats out in restaurants 200 times a year, but he and his girlfriend also cook at home, often Mexican food, often with hot peppers, some of which they grow in their own backyard.

We've got some kind of bells.

This year we are growing shishito peppers for the first time.

We love fish peppers.

They're very tiny and they have racing stripes.

They're beautiful.

One kind of hot pepper Brian doesn't grow, though, is the jalapeno, a chili originally cultivated in Veracruz, Mexico.

He shops for those at the supermarket.

And a little while ago, he started to notice something.

I kept buying jalapenos at the grocery store, and then more and more frequently, it just tasted like a bell pepper.

There was almost nothing to it.

It was a very simple, straightforward pepper flavor.

In jalapeno after jalapeno, it seemed to Brian like the spice was gone.

And at first, he thought it was just him.

Maybe I've become conditioned because now I eat serrano peppers and now I cook with habanero peppers sometimes and maybe I've just developed a greater heat tolerance.

And then finally it started to get to the point where I, I felt like I must be going crazy.

And then I started asking people, have you had this experience with jalapenos also?

I'd be cooking and I'd hold one up and I'd say, what's wrong with these things?

Have you noticed this?

And more and more people started saying, yeah, they're basically, there's nothing to them.

And then I said, you know what we can do?

And I pulled up my phone.

I texted, I think, like four or five different chefs all at once.

The answers came back quickly.

The first one was,

yes, definitely.

They're less hot than they used to be.

The second one was, I tell my cooks, my hands must be too sweet because I can't make the salsa hot enough anymore.

It wasn't just the taste that seemed different.

Some people noticed that jalapenos looked different, too.

I mean, you can just look at old menus and cartoon-type imagery where jalapenos used to have a big bend, like almost a 90-degree twist in the middle.

But now most of the jalapenos at the the store are straight.

Like, what did you think was going on?

I think my working theory was jalapeno growing operations were prioritizing growing them properly, keeping them happy compared to us at home where maybe we go out of town for a weekend and we forget about them and then we come back and they've been completely neglected and they become spicier because of that.

Right.

So you took what you knew, which is that like peppers are spicier under stress and where you're like, these are the most well taken care of peppers yeah so they're not that spicy yeah we need a farm to just treat their peppers like absolute garbage just leave them for months and months and come back to them and say oh my gosh i forgot we had these and then sell them

ryan knew that if he was going to figure out the truth he needed to run his theory by an expert he immediately thought of new mexico state university which is a whole institute dedicated to chili peppers he picked out one of their faculty members dialed her up and told her everything you've just heard.

And she started off very kindly and she said, I've heard these complaints before.

You're not the first.

And I felt really good for a moment.

And then she said,

but

it goes a lot deeper, and there's a lot better explanation available for you.

And then she said,

the peppers are designed that way.

And I said, excuse me?

And she said, well, it's completely on purpose.

And that's when the story of the great chili pepper conspiracy really started to unfold.

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willip Haskin.

The shiny, dark green jalapeno is the workhorse of hot peppers.

They're in hot sauces and chiladas and salsas.

They're canned, pickled, fresh, and smoked into chipotles, and they outsell all other hot peppers in the United States.

But these everyday chilies are a scientific and sociological marvel, a complicated testament to the American love affair with Mexican food sitting right there on the grocery store shelf.

In today's episode, we're going to tell the decades-long saga of the jalapeno and its fluctuating spice levels.

It's a story about how this one pepper helped American palates progress from mild to medium to hot and then couldn't keep up.

So today on decodering, who took the heat out of the jalapeno?

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So, to test out his theory, Brian Reinhardt had called an expert at New Mexico State University.

Someone named Stephanie Walker, because she had been the chair of the Chili Pepper Conference.

Yes, I've been getting a lot of calls about jalapenos lately.

We call Dr.

Stephanie Walker, too.

She's a professor and extension vegetable specialist, and she got back to us during a break from planting.

This is the time of year where we're putting our various chili experiments in the field.

Turns out, like Brian, Stephanie wasn't born with spice in her life.

I didn't know anything about chili peppers or heat.

When we moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, when I was starting middle school, I started eating chili.

I developed

a love for it.

And then I actually, after I got my bachelor's degree, I went to work in a chili pepper processing facility.

And that's where I really fell in love with chili peppers.

So have jalapenos gotten less spicy?

So in my opinion, yes.

And to really understand why, I asked Stephanie to start at the beginning.

What is the thing that makes chili spicy?

Oh, capsaicin.

Capsaicin and very closely related chemicals are only made in members of the capsicum genus.

So chili peppers are very unique in having that type of pungency that you experience when you eat chili peppers.

I actually am really interested in like how how jalapenos, but maybe more largely like chili peppers, grow,

and also how they're bred.

Like, how do we have all these different kinds of chili peppers to begin with?

Are they just naturally occurring or some of them?

Yeah, well, actually, they've been created by humans.

So, you know, the original chili pepper, it's called the mother of all chili peppers, is the chiltipine type.

So they're very small, usually round or slightly elongated peppers that grow in bushes.

And even though the heat kind of evolved in chili peppers to dissuade mammals from eating them, human mammals discovered they love this heat sensation.

So humans then started the selecting process.

So this goes back thousands of years.

And just through humans actively selecting, we have the vast array of chili pepper varieties that we see today.

And that vast array of different human-selected breeds of peppers is what Stephanie emphasized to Brian.

The point she made to me was the jalapeno is a family.

There are so many different varieties of jalapeno.

It is not just a pepper.

And humans are still actively selecting when it comes to chili pepper varieties.

In fact, it's key to what's happened to the jalapeno.

In the early 1980s, demand for Mexican food was growing all over America.

Sales at Mexican restaurants had doubled in just a few years, but consumer tastes varied widely.

Even though there's a lot of folks out there who love very, very hot jalapenos, there's a lot who don't like hot foods.

Companies wanted to be able to sell products at every level of spice, but there was this big problem, one Stephanie is very familiar with because she was working at a chili pepper processor back then.

A big issue was predicting heat level.

For chili peppers, predicting pungency is hard.

So the pungency level of a different chili pepper variety is based on genetics, but also the environment.

When we did vats of salsa, we wanted to have it mild, medium, or hot.

And if you happen to get like a load of jalapenos that was extra hot, we might mislabel a whole day's run of medium or mild salsa.

So, we actually had a program where our field department would go out and pre-sample fields before they were harvested so we could get a good idea: how hot are these peppers, how do we need to adjust the formulation when we make mild, medium, or hot salsa.

And we discovered it didn't work.

The chili peppers was just too unpredictable.

But there is a more predictable substance, an extract called oleoresin capsaicin, which is pure capsaicin, extracted from hot chili peppers, basically.

And then it's just like a liquid that you get.

It's a very, very dangerous liquid.

Yeah.

Yeah, the ingredient buckets have the skull and crossbones on it.

And yeah, it's like pure, pure heat.

So it's, yeah, you don't want to mess with it.

Oleoresin capsaicin is the active ingredient in pepper spray.

It makes it possible to take something mild and make it spicy.

Whereas you can never take something spicy and make it mild.

It's just like salt.

You can add more, but you can't take any away.

So a mild jalapeno, from the manufacturer's perspective, is actually a lot more versatile than a spicy one.

And so as Brian Reinhart learned, companies thought growing a mild pepper could solve their problem.

Okay, well, if we can find a way to make sure that they're all mild,

then we can choose the spice level.

So as this problem became more widely known in the industry, agriculture departments and breeders started working on how can we standardize the jalapeno pepper and get something that hits all the attributes that we want.

And one of the people they called was a chili expert named Dr.

Benigno Vallon, who goes by Ben, among other names.

You know, they called me Dr.

Pepper, you know, so I was the man for the job.

Ben's 88.

He was raised on a vegetable farm in South Texas, and he has degrees in plant breeding, genetics, and pathology.

He also worked at Texas A ⁇ M for 30 years, and that's where he was when the salsa industry reached out.

They came to me, Pace Foods, Ol El Paso, La Victoria, and all of the big guys, they came to me and they said, if we had a mild jalapeno, we could sell a lot more salsa picante with less heat.

So I said, well, we already have it.

We've been working since 1972.

In the 70s, Ben had been trying to breed a virus-resistant bell pepper by crossing it with different peppers, including jalapenos.

After a lot of cross-breeding, he realized he'd inadvertently created a low-heat jalapeno.

Took us about 10 years to get back to the jalapeno flavor.

It's not an easy thing to do because every pepper, no matter what it is, has its own flavor profile.

And they said that they wanted it because customers said that they didn't want spice.

That's right.

People don't like to get their mouths burned and all that kind of stuff.

And so they said, why don't you release it, Mild Jalapeno?

And so a couple of years later, we did.

That low-heat pepper was released in the early 1980s as the Tam jalapeno.

Tam stands for Texas A ⁇ M.

And it seemed to do exactly what the processing plants wanted.

It was controllably, mildly hot.

It was resistant to bugs.

It didn't develop kind of gnarly black spots and it wasn't so curved.

It's a glorious little invention.

It was a huge, huge help to industry because suddenly you could get jalapenos, you could predict what the formulation was going to be.

They were able to give you the mild, medium, and hot salsa.

And that's when the salsa industries really started booming.

Their sales went up not only for the processing industry, but the fresh market also.

By 1990, the United States outsold catch-up everyone with the mild salsa.

Things kicked up even more in the early 2000s when the TAM 2 came out, an even milder, more predictable pepper developed by Ben's successor at Texas A ⁇ M.

60% of jalapenos go to processing plants.

So that's what farmers prioritize.

And so mild jalapenos became the dominant crop.

So useful for mass-produced salsa, they've trickled into the produce aisle too.

And this seems to be happening more and more, according both to Brian's taste buds and even to those of Ben Villalon, the man who created the mild jalapeno in the first place.

I don't like the ones at the store because they're hybrids and a lot of them don't have any heat at all.

You don't like the ones at the store?

No, because they don't even have flavors.

I asked Brian how he felt when Stephanie explained that his experience was the result of a deliberate decades-long effort to grow milder jalapenos.

I definitely felt like I was being shown the man behind the curtain.

I felt like I was talking to somebody who was telling me that they knew what really happened to JFK or where the aliens are.

Nobody's been hiding this information, nobody's been conspiring with this information, but somehow we just missed it.

And maybe part of the reason we missed it is because it's not the first time something like this has happened.

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What's happened to the jalapeno has happened before.

In fact, it's happened over and over again.

First and foremost, Americans have been obsessed with Mexican food from the moment they encountered it.

Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the LA Times and the author of Taco USA, How Mexican Food Conquered America.

Mexican food first starts getting into the American consciousness really in the 1880s, but explodes in the 1890s.

And you had two dishes in particular that made it happen.

One of them were tamales.

Tamales are, of course, the quintessential Mexican food.

On the other hand, you have chile concarne.

In the plazas of San Antonio, women known as chili queens opened all-night open-air restaurants serving up bowlfuls as guitars played.

And Tamale street vendors hawked their wares all over cities like San Francisco.

And Americans were just so enticed by the scene of it.

More importantly, they were enticed by the food.

And the American media got curious about them.

And so you started seeing these dispatches in publications like The Atlantic, like Harper's Weekly.

How are they describing them?

Like, what are they saying about them?

They always,

they always end up obsessing on the spice.

You have these stereotypes like that.

It tastes like the fires of hell, but they're not disparaging it.

They're not disparaging it.

They are praising it, but warning people in advance, hey, this is going to be hot.

The dishes became even more well-known after the 1893 Chicago World Fair.

And that's arguably where Mexican food had its nationwide debut.

The city of Chicago is awash with tamale vendors.

Chicago is also the meat packing capital of the United States.

It's also the canning capital.

So as this is happening, these big companies, they get the brilliant idea of packing tamales in a can and packing chile concarne in a can.

They then spread around the rest of the United States and Americans gobble it up.

So those were the two first famous dishes that Americans got obsessed over.

And then every decade, everything that I just told you repeats.

Every decade, you have Americans, quote unquote, discovering something at a restaurant and travel somewhere.

They become obsessed with it.

Entrepreneurs then spread it around the rest of the United States.

Americans love it, eat it to the point where it becomes assimilated into the American diet.

And then Americans say, okay, what's next?

I want something more, quote unquote, authentic.

It happens almost every decade.

It happens in the 1900s with chili powder, in the 1920s with rice and beans.

And then entrepreneurs sell the country on margaritas and fajitas, and especially on tacos.

Watch us make your food up fresh.

And taco bell, taco bell.

Make you feel your taste buds tingle.

Taco bell, taco bell.

And onward and onward.

It has been a slow but steady march of Mexican food conquering American palates and stomachs.

When the food or the dish or the ingredient becomes like so omnipresent, does there start to be this conversation about like it's not as good?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's it's partly true though.

And a lot of this does have to do with the mass production of the cuisine.

I mean, look, when you're going to mass produce anything, you have to sacrifice certain attributes.

You have to commodify everything.

So people who grow ingredients for Mexican food in the United States have always modified their flavor so they could become more popular.

You're talking about jalaspeños right now, but in Mexico, remember, tequila can only come from five states in Mexico.

It's a protected designation.

Well, in the 1940s, these tequila producers realized, hey, Americans, they're starting to come to Mexico in record numbers.

They're liking our tequila, but they find it too harsh.

Let's change the recipe.

So they changed the recipe to make it more palatable to Americans.

And we all know what happened with tequila becomes a huge, huge sensation to the point now, of course, where you're getting these same tequila companies.

Now you have tequila companies saying, we need, we need to make tequila for Mexicans.

And of course, the Americans don't want the Americanized tequila anymore.

They want the Mexicanized tequila.

Well, so, I mean, it sounds like there's this kind of paradox, right?

Like there's this growing taste for spiciness or for tequila, for something.

And then it starts to take off.

And then this businesses are like, oh, we actually need to get even bigger.

So we have to standardize even more.

And then it does get bigger and it is really popular, but it opens up space for certain consumers to be like, no, no, we want like the first thing.

You mentioned paradox.

That's the best way of putting it.

The American consumer at first, they want something that's watered down.

They accept it.

You have an entire industry.

being created to match what they wanted originally.

But then the American gets inured to that modified flavor profile, and then that's when they want more.

But by then, it's too late.

And that's the story of jalapenos too.

In the latter part of the 20th century, Americans became interested in salsas and the peppers that go into them.

The jalapeno immediately resonated with American palates.

The name itself is just so intriguing.

Jalapino,

jalapeno.

You know, the American just gets so intrigued by foreign words and jalapeno.

I mean, God, you want to talk about a Mexican word, try jalapeño.

The J is pronounced like a ja.

Then you have the little tilde, of course, on top, the little squiggly thing in the N, which turns into an eñe.

And then if you really want to go deep track, jalapeño refers to the town of jalapa in the state of Veracruz.

And jalapa, just to confuse Americans more, is with an X.

So it's just the name itself is so intriguing.

And this is all, by the way, before you actually taste it.

And then you taste it.

I mean, you have to put yourself in the mindset of Americans in the 60s and 70s when Mexican food is still not where it is today.

Of course, they're going to get intrigued.

And they wanted it in their salsas and hot sauces, as long as it wasn't too hot.

So breeders developed mild peppers for processors, and suddenly they were everywhere.

Peace-thinking Chunky Salsa puts only fresh jalapenos in every jar for that gold taste born in San Antonio.

This stuff made it New York City.

New York City!

But as non-Mexicans ate more and more of this stuff, their palates changed in turn.

There was a point where Americans or non-Mexicans could not stand heat at all.

But yes, as the decades have gone on, Americans have gotten a tolerance for salsa spice, and Americans are starting to escalate their heat to the point now, of course, where we have the hot ones and you have kids just loving all of it, and adults too, for that matter.

Americans, more than anything.

You don't see Mexicans doing these fucking contests where, like, oh, I'm going to eat 15 Carolina Reapers at once.

What you just ate is the hottest, most disgusting hot sauce in the world.

It's like such an American thing.

It's kind of funny and kind of pathetic, too.

I feel like I'm going to die.

I know.

I don't get it.

This is the actor Jennifer Lawrence on the popular YouTube show, Hot Ones, where guests eat increasingly spicy hot stuff.

I don't know what's it, nothing else.

I know, I know.

Is my face so creamy?

That is just masochism.

I don't want that.

Do you, have you noticed that jalapenos in particular have gotten mild?

No, because for me, the jalapeno was never spicy to begin with.

The hottest jalapenos are not that hot.

But so jalapenos historically, at least in my family, you would use them for the flavor.

A good jalapeno has a good, verdant flavor to it, very fresh, very invigorating flavor the way other chiles don't have.

But there's nothing wrong with putting a little bit of spice into it.

I do not take a little bottle of hot sauce with me to diners, but I do take a big, huge serrano.

I just went, I just ate out of French bistro the other day.

I'm like, what was it?

I had a croque madame yesterday.

French.

I love French food.

They're not going to have any heat.

I need a little bit of heat.

So I whipped out my serrano.

My friend who was with me, he didn't blink because he knows who I am.

But the waitress comes in.

She's like, oh, did we give you one?

I'm like, no.

And she was impressed.

She's like, okay.

Do you like it?

Do you ask for a knife?

Like, what do you do with it?

Are you just

for a chile in the serrano?

Hell no.

It's called the chile de mordida, a biting chili.

So you get it, you eat it, and um, you eat it like a carrot.

That's, oh my God, cutting it up into small little pieces.

That's fun.

I mean, you can do that, but no, no, no.

If you're going to bring a chile, you eat it haci de mordida, like biting.

And it was freaking good.

And the, the owners of the restaurant, they were be mused.

And I told them, look, your food's absolutely amazing.

Don't get me wrong.

It was super, super good, but I still need some spice, you know, I'm a Mexican.

For Gustavo, what's happened to Mexican food over and over again is on the whole a good thing because even imperfect Mexican food can bring people together.

I could tell you how loathed Mexicans have always been and how loath Mexican food was, but now you have kids growing up, your kids growing up with good hot sauces.

You know, people in Southern California, in the American Southwest, in Colorado, white kids growing up with Mexican food food as part of their mother's milk, so to speak, and growing up with Mexicans.

It does make relationships better between Mexicans and Americans.

So I do remain optimistic that Americans will all eventually become Mexicans.

If you go to a supermarket, basically anywhere in America at this point, there is an aisle where there will be salsa.

Lots and lots and lots of salsa.

A bounty of options.

And many of these options are only possible because of the existence of a mild jalapeno.

But the rub is that this same jalapeno is in another part of the grocery store, the produce aisle, keeping us from having options in our cooking.

Brian Reinhart again.

I think the issue is not so much that the Tam pepper exists.

I think that the failing, the failing came at the marketplace when they took over and we didn't really understand what was happening.

We didn't understand that a certain amount of choice was going away or that even that there is another kind of jalapeno available at this point.

That was certainly not their intention.

They didn't mean to dominate the market in that way.

Yes.

They didn't intend for us all to forget that another kind of pepper existed.

For me, I mean, I'm lucky.

I can always just go out to our own fields and harvest jalapenos if I wish to get the heat level I want.

Dr.

Stephanie Walker, the pepper expert again.

But yeah, if you're just at the mercy of grocery stores or even farmers markets, it's going to be harder to get exactly what you may want.

If you go to a grocery store and you like are in the aisle, can you just eyeball them and be like, I can't do that.

No, no, no, no, you can't.

There's no hope for the rest of us either.

You can't.

Stephanie hopes we're on the cusp of an heirloom pepper movement.

Like what's happened with tomatoes?

The grocery store just used to sell generic red softballs, but now you can get colorful, wrinkly, tasty heirloom tomatoes in every shape and size and markets and restaurants and even plant them in your own garden.

If you want a good hot jalapeno, buy some of these heirloom varieties.

You know, plant your own.

If you are a chef and want a predictable heat, a predictable flavor in your peppers, for goodness sakes, don't just say, I want mild peppers, I want hot peppers.

Get to know these varieties because these are, as with wine grapes, as with heirloom apples, you know, they're very unique, and we need to celebrate this amazing germplasm and hope that we keep it available.

In the meantime, you can just do what Dr.

Ben Vialon, aka Dr.

Pepper, the one who created the first mild jalapeno, does, and make a different choice at the market.

I know, I go for the serranos at the Superman because they're hot.

And if the day ever comes when your Serrano peppers start to taste different, well, maybe it's not just you.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willip Haskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was produced by Evan Chung.

We produced Decodering with Katie Shepard and Max Friedman.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

I also really encourage you to go read Brian Reinhart's piece for D Magazine, all about his jalapeno hunt, which we'll link to on our show page.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed an Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts, and even better, tell your friends.

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