Carolina Reapers?

I was at Home Depot and they had these huge Carolina Reaper plants - already at least 2 feet tall - two weeks ago. My grandson thought it was very funny that there was a sign in front of the plants that said, “Consumption of large quantities can cause death” and wanted me to buy it. As a dutiful grandpa, I did. The flowers have opened and pollinated. What do I do with the peppers when they are ripe? Throw them away? Scoville is over 1.6 MILLION.

Ultra hot peppers were my gateway into vegetable gardening years ago. They are very fun to grow since they aren’t going to be eaten by anything and are relatively pest free. Unfortunately, they take forever to go from green to ripe. Depending on when the fruit was set you are going to be on the cusp of getting a ripe one before cooler weather in the fall slows and eventually stops the plant.

If you do get one to ripen, please please please wear eye protection and gloves when handling. I had an entire second set of tools for hot peppers (cutting boards, knives, blender, pots, etc) for making hot sauce. Whatever it touches will inevitably pick up heat and if it’s a porous surface if will be, for all intents and purposes, forever.

Now onto actually answering your question. 1/16th of a pepper into a pot of chili. 1/16th of a pepper in hot pepper jam. 1/2 a pepper in a 5 gallon fermentation bucket with sweet peppers, onions, and carrots (fermenting tempers the heat a bit. Or just throw them away(compost), which is what I ended up doing after realizing I could grow 100x the peppers you’d eat in a year. We now just grow some regular hots (jalapeño, cayenne, Thai) and maybe one habanero.

Additionally - if you keep the pepper potted instead of in the ground, you can bring it inside and overwinter it in a southern facing window and then you will for sure be able to set fruit early enough next spring.

How long from when the fruit is tiny but its staring to grow until it ripens? I probably have 2-3 months until it gets too cold and it is about at that point in the growing cycle now.

2 months isn’t unreasonable, I always assume 4-6 weeks once the pods are full size. Cooler nights, 50s and below, really bog them down even though it won’t die until frost hits.

I grow hot chilies. Lots pf Jalapeno, Cayenne, Habanero, Ghost Peppers and this year Thrinidad Scorpion. I use the non life threatening varieties in cooking etc. The bulk go into a hot sauce that I make and give to friends and family. 2020 was a very hot year where I live and I had an unreasonable amount of Ghost Peppers. I sent them whole to people who wanted them. People did everything from cook with them to putting them into a decanter full of Tequila as a flavoring.

I’ll take what you don’t want!

With something this hot, can you ever taste the pepper? What I mean is, the cool thing to me with habaneros is the wonderful fruity flavor that stands out in a dish even with the heat. But something as spicy as this, I’ve wondered if you have to dilute so much with other stuff that the only thing left to taste is the heat. Or can you remove the seeds etc. and reduce the heat to something more reasonable?

I had a bumper crop of ghost peppers and habaneros last year. I made a vinegar based hot sauce with the habaneros and dehydrated the extra ghost peppers. After they were dehydrated, I ground them up and tossed them in a jar. A little goes a long way.

I made this jam a few times from habaneros a few years ago and really liked it. Soaking the peppers in alcohol removed lots of heat and left the fruity habanero flavor. I’ve used both vodka and tequila as the alcohol to tame the peppers. Each of them were extremely hot after soaking the habaneros.

Here’s a master hot pepper sauce recipe:

No you cannot dilute it to something more reasonable and still taste the pepper. Hence why I just stopped growing super hot peppers. Super hots are just a gardening form of a pissing contest.

I made hot sauce from my reapers (wearing gloves and goggles). 3-4 drops on dishes heated things up but it’s over the top and wrecks my stomach. For really hot chilis, my favorite were Fatalii. They have a citrusy flavor and make great hot sauce. But overall, growing those reapers, chili x, scorpions etc was a one time deal and a waste of garden space for me. Too hot.

I grew a reaper plant a few years ago and made fermented hot sauce with them. I should have cut it with some more bell peppers or something milder. It came out too hot to really even use. It got tossed 6 months later, barely touched. It was too hot to really use for anything. I probably won’t grow them again.

A pissing contest after eating super hot chilis sounds like a painful experience…

Especially if you didn’t use gloves to prep the chilis.