Charapita

Description

Charapita (C. chinense) grows wild and semi-wild in the northern Peruvian Amazon — around Iquitos in Loreto, Tarapoto in San Martín, and into Ucayali. The name comes from charapa, the affectionate Peruvian word for someone from the lowland jungle. It has been picked and used there long before anyone outside Peru had heard of it.

The pods are tiny: 5–8 mm across, perfectly round, standing upright on slender stems and ripening from green to a clean bright yellow. In strong sun they can blush purple before they turn. The skin is thin and the flesh firm and crisp, and the flavour is the reason to grow it — bright, fruity and distinctly citrusy, floral rather than tropical, with very little bitterness. The heat builds gradually instead of hitting at once, and lands somewhere in the 30,000–50,000 SHU region by most accounts.

Field trials in Peru put flowering at around 100 days and fruiting at about 110. The plant is wide and bushy, over a metre given room, and carries hundreds of pods in a season — in Peru it is commonly kept as a houseplant, so container culture is native to it rather than a compromise.

You may have read that this is the most expensive chili in the world at $25,000 a kilo. That figure comes from a single 2016 news story and no credible source has ever substantiated it; in Amazonian markets the pods are sold by the bagful. What is true is that it takes roughly 20,000 individual pods to make a kilo of dried product — the cost is in the picking, not the growing.

Use them whole and fresh in salsas and ceviche, scattered over a finished dish, or dried.

Some chilies are worth tasting before you grow them. → Explore the Vault

Each pack contains approximately 8–10 or more seeds per variety.
Seeds are packaged in a certified EU seed packaging facility in accordance with applicable regulations.

Categories: Chili Seeds , C. chinense , Hot , Bonsai , Easy to grow , Ornamental