Mild cayenne-type chili peppers?

<table align="right" valign="top"><tr><td><img src="http://www.hormel.com/images/glossary/p/pepper_red_cayenne.jpg" border="1" align="left"></td></tr></table>Just recently I came across something interesting. I was at my grocer's and saw that he has red chili peppers (the long, thin pointy ones) that are very deep red and about 4-5" long. I bought one and cut off a tiny bit at home to try - and found much to my amazement that there was very little heat in it at all; it was just mildly hot. I ended up using the entire 5" pepper in one pot of chicken curry, and it only came out mildly hot.

Normally, I would expect a whole pepper like that in a small pot of stew to cause a gustatory inferno, but not this time. Are there reasons that some chilies don't taste hot, or might this be another variety entirely?

[Robin Garr]

Paul, of course there's a lot of random and not-so-random variation among any fruit or vegetable - even grapes! I've often found that jalapeños, for example, will vary unpredictably from barely piquant to fiery, and you can't tell by looking. One likely variable, it seems to me, might be a lot of rain just before harvest. That's my best guess, just a randomly low-Scoville cayenne.

Robin, the next time you are in the Liquor Barn, buy a little bit of their garlic and red peppers in olive Oil. the peppers are long thin peppers like Cayenne or some such, and the garlic is peeled. And both are really yummy.