Are peppers healthy? What types of peppers are there? How do you grow peppers? We’re sharing all our pepper wisdom with you to help you learn what makes these veggies such an important part of people’s diets around the world.
There are many different types of peppers to enjoy and each one has its own profile of flavors & textures. Each profile pairs with other ingredients or cuisine styles and each has a different balance of sweetness and heat. There’s a different pepper for everyone and most certainly for every occasion!
When enjoying a healthy snack, you want three things: flavor, convenience, and freshness. There’s no doubt that greenhouse grown peppers offer all three of those important qualities, but the kind of flavor and the level of convenience depends on what kind of snacking occasion you find yourself craving.
If you’re on the way to school, taking a break at soccer practice, snacking at your desk, or powering up after a workout, the most convenient pepper for you is Aurora Bites Mini Sweet Peppers.
Aurora Bites are two-bite peppers with a flavor similar to Sweet Bell Peppers, but are significantly smaller in size, sweeter, have fewer seeds, and come in convenient snack-sized packages.
A lot of people like to slice Sweet Bell Peppers for a fresh snack to include in lunch bags or in a veggie snack tray with a dip, but with Pure Flavor’s® greenhouse grown Aurora Bites Mini Sweet Peppers you save so much time and work!
You don’t have to cut them: each mini pepper comes in the perfectly snackable size. Just rinse and dip!
According to Registered Dietitian Christina Iaboni, veggies like Aurora Bites Mini Sweet Peppers that make healthy snacking more convenient, are an important part of raising happy eaters in your home. Lisa Andrews, another Registered Dietitian who is equally as passionate about healthy eating, agrees, saying that “Aurora Bites Mini Sweet Peppers also offer loads of vitamin C with a crispy, crunchy texture that can’t be beat. Did you know that vitamin C aids in iron absorption? It’s true!”
In fact, Aurora Bites Mini Sweet Peppers contain more vitamin C than an orange!
What are the health benefits of Peppers?
- Color: Always look for bright, vibrant and consistent color when purchasing tomatoes. Vines should always be green.
- Texture: Select tomatoes that are firm – not soft, but not hard either.
- Consistency: Greenhouse grown tomatoes are prized for their consistency and quality in flavor, texture, and color. Look for the little logo that says “Greenhouse Grown.”
- Packages: Always inspect packs to make sure they’re properly sealed and product inside is consistent.
- Size: Snacking tomatoes come in different pack sizes to meet your family’s needs.
With these sweet snacks, there’s no “convincing” kids to be healthy: they reach for Aurora Bites every time thanks to their sweet flavor, delicate crunch, and rainbow of vibrant colors. It’s no surprise that they come from the award-winning Tribelli seed, which was named the 2019 winner of the International Taste Institute’s Superior Taste Award.
The added convenience of these small peppers also makes them great for including in a variety of simple, savory recipes. For example, Laurel from Darn Good Veggies makes a delicious Vegan Vegetable Primavera that only takes 15 minutes to make – wow that’s about as convenient a dinner recipe can be!
Sweet Bell Peppers are a favorite choice when making delicious homemade recipes. They’re the best peppers for stuffed pepper recipes, but also for so many other kinds of tasty dishes like Bell Pepper Tacos and Grilled Vegetable Salad. They’re not just for dinner recipes either – these peppers can add a healthy dose of flavor and essential nutrients to your breakfast.
When you want to cook a truly special meal with restaurant quality and chef-inspired flair, look no further than the Craft House Collection®. It’s a line of premium cooking vegetables crafted by generations and grown for the chef in you. Each ingredient in the collection was selected for unique properties that make them great for exploring new flavors and experimenting in the kitchen.
When you cook with the Craft House Collection®, you feel like a chef in a trendy, gourmet restaurant because you’re working with ingredients real chefs use every day to make new and exciting dishes. Why do chefs love to cook with certain fresh vegetables instead of others? One word: versatility. Craft House vegetables give you everything you need to create. The only limit is your own imagination!
Craft House Aurora Long Sweet Peppers offer rustic flavor that complements many different pairings and cuisine styles. They’re a great choice when you want to make a traditional Italian dish like Mushroom & Pepper Pasta or sweeten up authentic Mexican Enchiladas.
The most recent addition to the Craft House Collection® is Shishito Peppers, a truly unique variety of peppers that can bring enticing, gourmet flavor to your dinners and appetizers. A Japanese variety, Shishito Peppers taste great when charred.
Shishito Peppers also have an elusive spark of heat. How hot are Shishito Peppers? 1 in 10 can jump from low heat, similar to Sweet Bell Peppers, all the way to the medium heat of Jalapeño Peppers. They can range from only 100 Scovilles to 2,500 Scovilles if you’re familiar with the lingo used to measure spiciness. That means you can add a fun spark to your meals with recipes like Roasted Pineapple and Shishito Pepper Ahi Poke or Shishito Pepper Wontons.
What’s the Scoville Scale?
The Scoville scale is simply a way to measure the spiciness of peppers. Think of it as a kind of thermometer for your taste buds!
In the early 20th century, Wilbur Scoville, an American pharmacist, was pretty fed up with burning his mouth on hot peppers, so he devised a way to measure how hot each variety was. Of course, he didn’t test them himself. Instead, he got a group of taste testers together to try an experiment. He diluted the pepper in water and sugar and had people taste the mixture over and over, adding more water each time, until they no longer felt any heat. The amount of dilution needed is the number of Scovilles you see on this chart. Some peppers are more than one million Scovilles, but Shishito Peppers have a lively warmth that adds to the eating experience.
Craft House Shishito Peppers are perfect for grilling – plus, they come in convenient BBQ & Oven Grill Pack so all you need to do is drizzle with oil and toss on the grill!
All these peppers are grown in sustainable and eco-friendly greenhouses, which means they’re available year-round – even in winter.
Each pepper is grown using highly advanced growing technology that ensures maximum efficiency. Efficiency is key to growing peppers because it means we can produce more flavorful peppers for families across North America to enjoy while reducing waste.
Our family of growers manage each drop of water that each plant receives using a computer-controlled closed-loop irrigation system. The temperature and humidity of the greenhouse is controlled too – all from a smartphone! We also use supplemental lighting to make sure every plant gets the amount of light it needs, even when the sun is lower in the sky. All that attention to detail helps us ensure you get to enjoy consistent quality every time you purchase a Pure Flavor® Pepper.
With these efficient growing methods, greenhouse grown peppers are perfectly ripe after 110 to 135 days. They are picked right away and delivered directly to retailers near you. Not only does greenhouse growing save energy and help you get fresh picked veggies year-round, but it also means you can be confident you are eating nutrient-dense, high-quality food every day.
When you buy peppers from the supermarket, you might wonder how to pick the best, freshest peppers. With all pepper types and varieties, you should look for bright, vibrant color, smooth skin and consistency. In other words, look for the logo that says “Greenhouse Grown.”
To learn more about the many pepper varieties we grow and how we grow them, click here or view our Twenty Pepper Facts.
To explore the recipes you can create with peppers, click here.
