Rocoto

• rocoto

  Spanish — Peru

• locoto

  Spanish — Bolivia and northern Argentina

• chile manzano

  Spanish — Mexico

  Literally "apple chilli", after the shape. Mexican usage also has chile perón and chile caballo for the same species, and none of those names is used in Peru — so a Mexican recipe and a Peruvian one can call for the same chilli under names that appear unrelated.

• rukutu

  Quechua

Juicy and fruity with a sharp, immediate heat that arrives fast and clears reasonably quickly, and without the lingering build of a habanero. The thick flesh means a mouthful delivers water and heat together, which makes it feel different from a thin-walled chilli of the same measured strength.

Fresh, green and juicy rather than aromatic — closer to a sweet pepper or an unripe apple than to a dried chilli. It gives very little warning of the heat.

Red, orange or yellow when ripe, thick-walled and glossy, with unmistakable black seeds inside. The seed colour is the single quickest identification.

Thick, crisp and watery flesh — closer to a sweet pepper than to any other chilli here, which is exactly why it can be stuffed and baked.

• Capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin — The heat, distributed through unusually thick flesh as well as concentrated in the ribs, so deveining reduces it less effectively here than in a thin-walled chilli.(what capsaicin is)
• Capsicum carotenoids — The red, orange or yellow of the ripe fruit.(what capsanthin is)

Wear gloves and treat it as hotter than it looks — the resemblance to a sweet pepper is the trap. For stuffing, blanch in changed water, sometimes with a little sugar or vinegar, until the heat is where you want it; taste the water rather than the chilli to judge it. For a salsa, use it raw and seeded. Deveining helps less here than with a thin-walled chilli, because the flesh carries more of the heat and there is a great deal more flesh.

Used fresh and used for heat. In Arequipa it is blanched, stuffed and baked as rocoto relleno, which the thick flesh makes possible and which no other chilli in this catalogue could stand in for. In Bolivia it is pounded raw into llajwa. In highland Mexico it is sliced into salsas. It is not a background seasoning anywhere: it is either the vessel or the heat.

• baking — Stuffed and baked whole, which is what the thick flesh is for — rocoto relleno is the dish, and no thin-walled chilli would survive it. Baking softens the flesh and moderates the heat somewhat without removing it.
• boiling — Blanched in changed water before stuffing in the Arequipan preparation, sometimes with sugar or vinegar in the water, specifically to draw down the heat. The same technique Peruvian cooking applies to ají amarillo, applied here to a much hotter chilli.
• grinding — Pounded raw into salsas — Bolivian llajwa above all — where none of the heat has been removed and none is meant to be.

Press the shoulder near the stem. It should be firm and springy; softness there is the first sign of rot and spreads quickly in a fruit this wet.

• Softness at the stem end
• Wrinkling of the shoulders
• Any mould, which means discarding the fruit

• Softening and rot in the thick wet flesh, which happens well before any drying could
• Mould at the stem end in humid storage

• Black seeds inside — the identification, and nothing else in the genus has them.
• Firm shoulders with no softness at the stem.
• Thick, heavy flesh; a light fruit for its size has begun drying out.
• Bought fresh from a Latin American grocer. There is no dried version to fall back on.

Solanaceae

A sprawling, sometimes woody perennial that can become a small tree and live for years, with hairy leaves — pubescens, hence the epithet — and purple flowers rather than the white ones of every other domesticated Capsicum. The fruit is rounded and thick-walled, ripening red, orange or yellow, and the seeds inside are black. Purple flowers, hairy leaves and black seeds are three independent field marks and no other cultivated chilli has any of them.

The Andes, at altitude. Capsicum pubescens is a highland domesticate and is grown from Peru and Bolivia through Ecuador and into Central America and Mexico, always in cooler upland conditions rather than in the lowlands the other chillies prefer.

• PE — origin. Arequipa in particular, where rocoto relleno is a regional dish.
• BO — major producer. Locoto is a household staple and the basis of llajwa.
• MX — notable producer. Grown in highland areas as chile manzano.
• EC — notable producer

Picked ripe and used fresh, generally within days.

1. Picking ripe — Taken fully coloured — red, orange or yellow depending on the variety — and handled like a fruit rather than a spice, because that is what it is at this point: thick-walled, juicy and perishable.
2. Deseeding — The seeds and the pale placental tissue are cut out and discarded, and this is where most of the heat goes: capsaicin is concentrated in the placenta rather than in the flesh or the seeds themselves.Why: A rocoto that has been deseeded is a substantially milder ingredient, which is what makes stuffing it possible at all.
3. Repeated blanching — For rocoto relleno the deseeded fruit is boiled in successive changes of water, commonly two or three, sometimes with sugar or vinegar added.Why: Capsaicin is only slightly water-soluble, so a single blanch does little; the repetition is what brings a fiercely hot fruit down to the point where it can be eaten whole. This step has no equivalent anywhere in the dried-chilli trade and is specific to a chilli eaten as a vegetable.
4. Freezing or pasting — Where it is preserved rather than eaten fresh, rocoto is frozen whole or blended into a paste with oil and salt. It is not dried.Why: The flesh is too thick and wet to dry in ordinary conditions — it rots first — which is why rocoto never entered the long-distance trade that carried ancho, guajillo and cayenne around the world.

Grown as a long-lived perennial rather than an annual, taking longer to fruit than other chillies and continuing to produce for several years. This alone makes it a poor fit for the annual field cultivation that carried other chillies around the world.

Cool highland, and it is the only Capsicum with real frost tolerance — it grows at altitudes and temperatures that kill annuum and chinense chillies outright. That tolerance is why it is an Andean crop and why it did not follow the other chillies into the tropical lowlands the Exchange carried them to.

Capsicum pubescens is an Andean highland domesticate with a long history in the region and essentially no history anywhere else. Where the Columbian Exchange carried annuum, chinense and frutescens chillies across the world within a century, rocoto stayed — it will not cross with the others, it needs cool conditions, it takes years to establish, and it cannot be dried. Its distribution today is close to what it was five hundred years ago, which makes it the clearest counter-example to the story that the Exchange moved everything.

Almost entirely local and regional fresh trade. It is not an export commodity and is rarely found fresh outside its growing range.