Skip to main content

Chilli Pepper Seed And Chilli Sauces

Chillies are wonderful plants. They are so varied, productive, useful and many are fantastically ornamental. We have been growing chilli peppers since 1998 and are still learning and still obsessed by them. Chilli Pepper Seeds and SaucesAs specialist chilli seed suppliers since 1999, our website includes what we hope you will find to be a very wide range of amazing chilli pepper seeds, from the very latest of the super-hots contending for the title of Hottest Chilli in the World to seeds for rare and beautiful chilli plants as well as all our longstanding favourite chillies. We are sure that you will find something interesting and enjoyable to grow. Please have a look at our seed pages including Jays Peach Scorpion chilli.

We started making sauce from our very first chillies, so as to try at first hand the quality and character of the fruits we were growing for seed and quickly became as enthusiastic about chilli sauce as we were for the plants. Our sauce and chutney pages feature our wide range of handmade products from the famous (infamous?) Ten Minute Burn sauce (banned from four chilli shows for being too hot!!) to our authentic American Heavenly Barbeque sauce and wonderfully warming chilli honeys.

Chilli Seeds

Chilli fruits are considered vegetables when green, a spice when red and dried, but are berries botanically. Fruit characteristics (i.e., pungency, colour, shape, flavour, size, and use) usually classify chilli types. Despite vast trait differences, nearly all chilli varieties commercially cultivated in New Mexico belong to one species, C. annuum. Other species are the tabasco (C. frutescens) and habañero (C. chinense).  Several hundred chilli varieties of C. annuum are grown in New Mexico. These include bell, New Mexican, Jalapeño, Cayenne, Yellow Wax, Ancho, Pasilla, Mirasol, and De Arbol, but most of New Mexico’s commercial acreage is limited to a few varieties.

Chillies Did you know?

New Mexican green and red chilli represent two developmental stages of the same fruit. First, the plant produces green fruits, which turn red if the pods are left on the plant. The red fruits are usually dried and ground into chilli powder (paprika if non-pungent). New Mexican green chilli is roasted and peeled for fresh consumption, canning or freezing. The flavour of green Chilli is completely different from red chilli because the pods are picked at a different age.  Green chilli cannot be transported long distances for fresh consumption because its quality will be reduced during shipping. Red chilli and paprika are dehydrated and sold as whole pods or ground into powder.

Paprika is currently used as colouring in sausages, cheeses, fruit gelatines, drugs, and cosmetics, as well as for improving the feather colour of flamingos in zoos! Good-quality paprika has high red colour, which is most important, and no pungency. Because paprika is defined as a product, not a pod-type in the U.S., it may be obtained from any one of many types of C. annuum. The word “paprika” means “Chilli” in Hungarian.

Chilli evolution

Chilli is native to the Western Hemisphere and probably evolved from an ancestral form in the Bolivia/Peru area. The first chillies consumed were probably collected from wild plants. Apparently the indigenous peoples were growing chilli plants between 5200 and 3400 B.C., which place chillies among the oldest cultivated crops of the Americas.

Chilli fruits are considered vegetables when green, a spice when red and dried, but are berries botanically. Fruit characteristics (i.e., pungency, colour, shape, flavour, size, and use) usually classify chilli types. Despite vast trait differences, nearly all chilli varieties commercially cultivated in New Mexico belong to one species, C. annuum. Other species are the tabasco (C. frutescens) and habañero (C. chinense).  Several hundred chilli varieties of C. annuum are grown in New Mexico. These include bell, New Mexican, Jalapeño, Cayenne, Yellow Wax, Ancho, Pasilla, Mirasol, and De Arbol, but most of New Mexico’s commercial acreage is limited to a few varieties.