Moderate to very hot chile peppers, green or sometimes red, with a fruity fresh taste.
In 1912, Wilbur Scoville invented a system for measuring the “heat” of different chili peppers, that is, their ability to tantalize, tenderize, or traumatize the palate. Under this system, jalapeno peppers rate around 5000 Scoville units, thus affirming what everyone already knows: that they are hot. Still, jalapenos are as fiery as talcum powder compared to habanero peppers, which rate about 300,000 Scoville units, making them roughly sixty times as hot as jalapenos. Both these peppers take their names from places where they originated: habanero from Havana, and jalapeno from Jalapa, a city in Mexico whose name in Nahuatl means sand by the water. The names of both peppers were introduced to English in the 1930s.