STANDARDIZATION BEGETS MEDIOCRITY.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.  The sort of travel snob who scoffs at McDonald's and Holiday Inn misses the value proposition of those enterprises, which is that the fries would be hot and the room spruced up, and in summer there would be a pool for the kiddos.  At least that was true during the American High; of late, McDonald's have been trashing their value proposition and diners are noticing: although in their defense, on weekend mornings they were the only eatery operating in suburban Manchester and serving strong coffee the few times I've been there.

So, too, goes it with the humble jalapeño.  If you want your pepper sauce to have a consistent flavor, you have to buy up an entire island in the Gulf of Mexico (Tabasco) or you have to limit your production when the crop is thin (Huy Fong Sririacha).  A link nailed to Newmark's Door brings you The Rest of The Story.

It’s not just you: jalapeño peppers are less spicy and less predictable than ever before. As heat-seekers chase ever-fiercer varieties of pepper—Carolina reapers, scorpions, ghosts—the classic jalapeño is going in the opposite direction. And the long-term “de-spicification” of the jalapeño is a deliberate choice, not the product of a bad season of weather.

Sometimes jalapeños get into the grow boxes at the Victor E. Garden.  This year there will be ghosts, Carolinas, and Scotch Bonnets as the chocolate habañeros were sold out by the time your correspondent got to the greenhouse.  If the birds don't mess with the tomato plants too much there should be new heat on hand come Oktoberfest season.

Apparently, dear reader, if you want some green heat, it's still available, but you might have to grow them yourself.

Gardening websites offered savvier advice: that peppers grow hotter under stress. If they’re well-watered, they won’t produce as much capsaicin, the chemical that generates the sensation we know as spiciness. But even this explanation leaves unanswered questions. My sunny backyard, which produces ferocious peppers, is one thing. What about all the peppers in the grocery store?

The key to the mystery is ... the Huy Fong problem writ large.

Most jalapeños go straight to factories, for canned peppers, pickled pepper rings, salsas, cream sauces, dressings, flavored chips and crackers, dips, sausages, and other prepared foods. For all those companies, consistency is key. Think about the salsa world’s “mild,” “medium,” and “hot” labels.

According to The Mexican Chile Pepper Cookbook by Dave DeWitt and José Marmolejo, 60 percent of jalapeños are sent to processing plants, 20 percent are smoke-dried into chipotles, and just 20 percent are sold fresh. Since big processors are the peppers’ main consumers, big processors get more sway over what the peppers taste like.

“It was a really big deal when breeders [told the industry], ‘hey, look, I have a low-heat jalapeño,’ and then a low-heat but high-flavor jalapeño,” Walker explained. “That kind of became the big demand for jalapeños—low heat jalapeños—because most of them are used for processing and cooking. [Producers] want to start with jalapeños and add oleoresin capsicum.”

Same problem that the Arches would have if the fries in Atlanta, Georgia came out very different from the fries in Atlanta, Indiana. If you're Pace, which is a Campbell Soups property, and people complain that the mild is too hot and the hot is too mild, why, that's almost as bad as leaving the Q and Z out of the vegetable soup.

Solution: get as standard a batch of peppers in as you can, and then season to taste!

Oleoresin capsicum is an extract from peppers, containing pure heat. It’s the active ingredient in pepper spray. It’s also the active ingredient, in a manner of speaking, for processed jalapeños. The salsa industry, [New Mexico extension specialist Stephanie] Walker said, starts with a mild crop of peppers, then simply adds the heat extract necessary to reach medium and hot levels. She would know; she started her career working for a processed-food conglomerate.

“I’ve worked in peppers in my entire life,” she told me. “Jalapeños were originally prized as being a hot pepper grown in the field. When we were making hot sauce in my previous job, we had the same problem, that you couldn’t predict the heat. When you’re doing a huge run of salsa for shipment, and you want a hot label, medium label, mild label, it’s really important to predict what kind of heat you’ll get. We tried a statistical design from the fields, and it just didn’t work, because mother nature throws stressful events at you or, sometimes, does not bring stress.”

And, yes, just as university colleges of agriculture created tomatoes that could be mechanically harvested and shipped longer distances, their researchers, primarily at Texas A&M came up with a more durable jalapeño.  In much the same way that there will always be scratchbuilders in model railroading, there will always be hobby farmers tending their gardens.

Walker compares the current state of the pepper industry with the world of American tomatoes, which were bred for hardiness in shipping, firmness, and canning. Only recently has an heirloom tomato revolution tried to cater directly to home cooks and chefs with tomato breeds that emphasize flavor and juiciness first.

“People lost a lot of interest in tomatoes for a long time until heirlooms came back,” Walker said. “Now we have the same thing with peppers. There’s a place for people to embrace heirloom peppers, the way that we have with tomatoes.”

Right about now, some rain on the grow boxes and the Victor E. Garden, both planted with all manner of exotics, would be helpful.