I am sure every kid has sat with a flower,, pulling off the petals, one at a time trying to work out love😂. Well, did we ever count the petals?
Moving on, there is a tapas dish. The Spanish description translates to devil between the angels and it is padron peppers covered in olive oil, lightly blistered over a flame sprinkled with salt. The average padron is 200 scoville units, so very mild, but about 1 in 10 is jalapeño heat level. How can you tell, offer one to someone who dislikes the heat, they normally get the hot one! So how can we tell?
Turns out, on my chilli path and seeing the relevance of flowers in identification has a clue for me to follow. Almost all pepper flowers have 5 to 7 petals in our 5 domesticated varieties, 4 to 9 in ythe estimated 20 species. Most plants the petals are uniform in number. Padron does not, they have 5 and 6 petal flowers on the same plant, along with its Japanese cousin Shishito, which while only 1/2 the heat, has the same 1 in 10 is hot reputation.
Experiment devil or angel is to take red and yellow cable ties, mark out the 5 and 6 petal flowers (5 of each) for both varieties and see if the 5 or six petals is and indicator of hot or not... I will update this in a later blog when I know the result so stay tuned.. To be continued...... 😉
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