Big Jim pepper


The Big Jim pepper is a New Mexico chile pepper cultivar of the species Capsicum annuum with a mild Scoville rating. This cultivar is extensively grown in New Mexico where it was developed and is popular in New Mexican cuisine. Big Jim peppers are both sweet and mild and are normally picked while still green. The fruits are large and thick walled, often exceeding over a foot in length, and they are almost exclusively used to produce roasted green chili in New Mexican cuisine.

History

The Big Jim pepper cultivar was developed at New Mexico State University by Dr. Roy Nakayama, a son of Japanese immigrants and a man who had once been denied entry into NMSU because of his ethnicity. The Big Jim is a hybrid of New Mexican chilies and a Peruvian pepper that was developed at New Mexico State University by Dr. Nakayama in 1975 in cooperation with Jim Lytle, the person for whom this chili pepper is named. The Big Jim chili holds the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest chili pepper in the world, with individual fruits routinely exceeding 14 inches in length. The peppers are mild when still green, but become more spicy as they ripen to red. They are rarely used as in their ripe form, and are almost exclusively used to produce green chili. In common with most New Mexico chili cultivars, Big Jim chilies are somewhat variable in their fruiting, and produce individual peppers of varying heat, with most of the peppers being very mild, and an occasional medium pepper.