How the Jalapeño Lost Its Heat
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2024
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
The jalapeño is the workhorse of hot peppers. They’re sold fresh, canned, pickled, in hot sauces, salsas, smoked into chipotles, and they outsell all other hot peppers in the United States. These everyday chilies are a scientific and sociological marvel, and tell a complicated story about Mexican food and American palates.
In today’s episode, we meet Dallas-based food critic Brian Reinhart, who fell in love with spicy Mexican cuisine as a teenager. Recently, Brian started to notice that the jalapeños he’d buy in the grocery store were less and less hot. So he called up an expert: Dr. Stephanie Walker, who studies chili pepper genetics at New Mexico State University. She explains that the food industry has been breeding milder jalapeños for decades – a project led by “Dr. Pepper” himself, Benigno Villalon.
Finally, Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano puts the jalapeño in context, as part of an age-old cycle in Americans’ obsession with Mexican food: one more ingredient that’s been “discovered,” celebrated, then domesticated.
Brian Reinhart’s article about the jalapeño ran in D Magazine. Gustavo Arellano’s book is called Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.
This episode was produced by Evan Chung, who produces the show with Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Ryan Reinhardt is a food writer. |
| 0:08.0 | And when he was growing up in southern Indiana, |
| 0:10.0 | he remembers that there was a way people talked about one particular cuisine, Mexican food. |
| 0:16.0 | The perception I always had, what people told me because they were Midwestern people, was, |
| 0:20.0 | oh, well, you've got to be |
| 0:20.9 | careful with Mexican food because so much of it is so spicy. And those peppers you got to watch out |
| 0:27.1 | for because they'll light you up every time. One winter, Brian's family went on vacation to San Antonio. |
| 0:33.0 | 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. |
| 0:40.3 | It was 70 degrees outside. |
| 0:42.3 | And we were calling home saying, yeah, we're having enchiladas and we're sitting outside, |
| 0:47.3 | and there are all these ducks floating across the water, and we're enjoying everything. |
| 0:51.3 | 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, |
| 0:58.7 | can you get a job down here? Brian's family lured in part by the taste of good Mexican food, |
| 1:05.2 | moved to Texas when he was in high school. I moved down the week I turned 16, so then |
| 1:10.6 | visiting with friends and going out and |
| 1:13.1 | everything turned into Mexican food or barbecue. |
| 1:16.9 | Brian's interest in food grew as he got older, and eventually he began writing about it |
| 1:20.8 | professionally. For the past two years, he's been a food critic at Dallas's D Magazine. |
| 1:25.9 | He eats out in restaurants 200 times a year, but he and his |
| 1:29.6 | girlfriend also cook at home, often Mexican food, often with hot peppers, some of which they grow |
| 1:35.4 | in their own backyard. We've got some kind of bells. This year we were growing Shoshito |
| 1:40.2 | peppers for the first time. We love fish peppers. They're very tiny and they have racing stripes. They're beautiful. |
... |
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