Tepin Peppers, Small but Mighty

I received a nifty piece of marketing today.



A law firm sent me a small package of chiletepin peppers today with the tag line that "Some of the world's most potent forces are also the most concentrated." The packaging goes on to claim the tepin pepper is the "world's hottest" and "extremely rare." (claims I find dubious as I know the habanero pepper is rated, by scoville, at least twice as highly as the claimed 100,000 scoville units on the package i received)

Anyone have any idea what i should do with these suckers? Maybe they arent even that rare, who knows. Thought I would ask here

iblock9 wrote:A law firm sent me a small package of chiletepin peppers today with the tag line that "Some of the world's most potent forces are also the most concentrated." The packaging goes on to claim the tepin pepper is the "world's hottest" and "extremely rare."

Analogizing that last sentence to the law firm, what exactly are they trying to convey about their services?

I usually get a card, that's it. Never peppers.

To answer your question, I found this, which claims that one pepper can heat up a batch of chili.

Here's an old post of mine which discusses the chiltepín peppers a bit. They're hot, but not as hot as habaneros.

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=4223&p=36008

Antonius and I use them a lot, both in cooking and to spice up dishes at the table. We used to get them at the Hyde Park Co-op but no more... (actually, the Co-op had stopped carrying them even before the store went under). We also bought some in New Mexico that were larger than the ones packaged under the Don Enrique label.

Wonder what the law firm's source is?

iblock9 wrote:The packaging goes on to claim the tepin pepper is the "world's hottest" and "extremely rare." (claims I find dubious as I know the habanero pepper is rated, by scoville, at least twice as highly as the claimed 100,000 scoville units on the package i received)

Let me get this straight - you actually expected a claim from a law firm to be true???

Amata wrote:lWonder what the law firm's source is?

My guess is a PR firm put the campaign together for the firm. I am sure most people looked at the peppers, thought "this is clever" and tossed the whole thing in the trash. As a personal inury lawyer (and the law firm who sent the peppers is not a PI law firm) i laughed at the warning labels commanding the use of rubber gloves when handling these small but mighty peppers. Lawyers are the first people to over-react

BTW thanks for the earlier link

Chiltepins are hot, especially for dried peppers. Habeneros don't dry very willingly. Tepins are also quite tasty--they're more than just heat. Grind them up in your spice grinder or mortar + pestle device and add to chili con carne or Mexican stews.

They can be difficult to grow. Most are sourced from the wild, since they're so hard to get started from seed. A buddy of mine brought some back from Central America, and we subjected them to various treatments, mostly in an attempt to duplicate passage through a bird's gut, which is how most wild tepin seed gets dispersed. I found that you can rough them up on very fine sandpaper, soak in 28% acetic (think of that bottle of German acid you saw in the Japanese grocery store, for example), and then sow in a heated bed at 22°C.

Penzey's sells a ground chiltepin which is pretty good.

Geo