Are Seedless Chili Peppers Less Spicy?
It’s in every recipe with chili peppers: if you don’t like spicy food, remove the seeds from the chili. Is that true? Is a seedless chili pepper less spicy? And if those seeds are so explosive, why can’t you just add dried seeds to your food when you want to set your mouth on fire, and leave the rest of that chili intact? We’re going to put out this little fire for you.
Why are hot peppers spicy in the first place? It’s to make sure they don’t get eaten. At least, not by humans. To ensure its survival, the plant doesn’t mind if a bird snatches the peppers, because it will simply poop the seeds out somewhere else, and before long chili peppers will dominate the world—or at least, that’s their plan. Capsaicin, the substance in peppers that makes your mouth burn, has no effect on birds’ beaks, but it does affect humans and mammals. It’s meant to scare us off, and that’s how the pepper tries to protect itself.
Not in the seeds
Interesting to know: capsaicin actually isn’t found in the seeds. Looked at that way, there’s no point in cutting the seeds out of the pepper. However, the highest concentration of capsaicin has been found in the ‘placenta’, the white ribs that the seeds are attached to in bell peppers and chili peppers. And that’s where the pepper’s secret lies: if you cut out those seeds before adding the chili to your food, you also remove those white ribs. So: less spicy. The flesh itself doesn’t contain any capsaicin, but it takes on that hot flavor from the seed ribs.
Chomping straight into a pepper
So if you have perfectly fresh peppers—for example, because you were clever enough to plant a red pepper plant in your garden or balcony planter—then cutting out the seeds is actually ridiculous. The flesh isn’t spicy, and the reason for using a pepper—namely, adding heat to your food—gets tossed into the green waste bin. And if that’s true, you could even eat habanero peppers as if they were strawberries, without so much as flinching, as long as you cut out those white seed ribs.
A pointless business
The summary of this story: the seeds of a chili pepper aren’t hot, but the seed ribs are. Shaking out the seeds is pointless, eating fresh pepper without the seed ribs is pointless, and chili peppers have a conspiracy to dominate the world.
