Can you eat Ornamental Peppers?
Are ornamental peppers good to eat?
Yes, you can eat ornamental peppers! In fact, Ornamental Peppers are quite prolific and are perfect peppers for making hot sauces, pepper flakes, hot pepper powder like Carolina Reaper Powder, or spicy salt, or to use in any recipe such as salsa recipes. So yes, ornamental peppers are good to eat! We like to wait until the end of the show and season to pick them, then we use them to make any number of spicy salts
While many peppers like the NuMex Twilight pepper are quite spicy, the pungency level of some of these ornamentals have not been evaluated, so you just have to taste them and see!
Sandia Seed's Trick to See How Hot a Pepper Is:
Slice a sliver of a cross section of the pepper, and touch it to your tongue. If it's super spicy from just a touch, you know it's super hot. Then add to your recipe accordingly. If you're like us, it's hard to get it TOO hot, but we're a bit crazy. :)
Sandia Seed's Trick to See How Hot a Pepper Is:
Slice a sliver of a cross section of the pepper, and touch it to your tongue. If it's super spicy from just a touch, you know it's super hot. Then add to your recipe accordingly. If you're like us, it's hard to get it TOO hot, but we're a bit crazy. :)
We like to add ornamental hot peppers like NuMex Twilight peppers or the Tabasco peppers into salsas, hot sauces, chiles, pasta sauces, omelettes, rice and bean dishes, curries, and salads. Cook them as you would along with garlic as a spicy base to add to any meal!Dry the Peppers and then make them into Hot Pepper Flakes!
Ornamental peppers are also good for drying on your counter or sunny windowsill (or in a Ristra) and grinding into hot pepper flakes. Learn How to Dry Peppers without a Dehydrator – then you can make hot pepper flakes to use in recipes all year long! What's great about peppers is that they retain most of their flavor in their dried form, so you can add chile pepper flavor to your food long after the harvest is over. This is also a great way to store your peppers, as they take up way less room (you can fit 50+ peppers in a pint jar once they're grounded down. To make pepper flakes, we use a mortar and pestle to grind up dried peppers, but you can also use blenders, food processors or even coffee grinders to make pepper flakes and powder. Learn how to make your own hot pepper flakes »
You can also make Hot Sauce or salsa with Ornamental Peppers, check out some of our hot sauce and salsa recipes:
- Grow Your Own Hot Sauce Recipe »
- No-Salt Hot Sauce Recipe-for those who want to reduce their sodium intake but not their spice intake!
- Carolina Reaper Salsa - it's not hot sauce, but it's HOT salsa! You can use Ornamental peppers in this recipe in place of the Reapers, just use as many as needed to get the spicy flavor you're looking for.
- Our Favorite Salsa Recipe
- Homegrown Chile-Garlic Sauce Recipe
- Easy Fermented Hot Sauce Recipe
