Green bell peppers are just unripe red bell peppers.
If you’ve ever found yourself in the grocery store struggling to decide between red and green bell peppers — or even just wondering what the difference is between them — you may be interested to learn that they’re the very same vegetable. In fact, green bell peppers are just red bell peppers that haven’t ripened yet, while orange and yellow peppers are somewhere in between the two stages. As they ripen, bell peppers don’t just change color — they also become sweeter and drastically increase their beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin C content. So while the green variety isn’t quite as nutritious as its red counterpart, the good news is that one eventually becomes the other.
Peppers have other superpowers, too. Capsaicin, the active component that makes hot chile peppers spicy (bell peppers lack it), has been used for pain relief and other medicinal purposes for centuries. It also pairs surprisingly well with chocolate, as the cocoa-obsessed Aztec emperor Montezuma could attest. Not all peppers are as friendly to the average palate, of course. According to the Scoville scale, which measures spiciness, the world’s hottest pepper (currently the Carolina Reaper) is 200 times hotter than your average jalapeño — which is to say, probably not something you’d use to add some kick to a burger.
In 1996, the Land of Enchantment became the first state to have an official question: “Red or green?” Chiles are hugely important in New Mexico, which produced 62,700 tons of them in 2017, and anyone ordering a dish made with the peppers will be asked to clarify their color preference. (Answering “Christmas” will get you a blend of the two.) The state celebrates peppers in other ways, too — Las Cruces is home to the world’s largest chile pepper (actually a 47-foot-tall concrete statue celebrating the beloved staple), while traveling 40 miles north to Hatch will land you in the self-proclaimed chile capital of the world. Hatch’s namesake chile has become famous both across the country and abroad, earning acclaim for its balance of sweetness and heat.
