Jalapeños are one of the easiest hot peppers to cook with. You’ll find them in nearly every grocery store, they’re thick-walled enough to stuff, and their heat is real but manageable. Still, a little know-how goes a long way, because where the heat lives in the pepper, how you cut it and how you cook it all change what ends up on your plate. Here’s how to pick good jalapeño peppers, cut them, control their heat and get the most out of every cooking method, plus how to store the ones you don’t use right away.
Jalapeño heat basics
A jalapeño runs 2,500 to 8,000 Scoville heat units, and that’s a wide range. At the bottom it’s barely hotter than a poblano or an Anaheim, and at the top it’s closing in on a serrano. Two peppers from the same bag can land at opposite ends, so taste a thin sliver of each batch before you decide how much to use.
Green jalapeños are picked young and taste bright, grassy and a little bitter. Red ones have ripened on the plant, and they’re sweeter and usually a touch hotter. Both work in most recipes, but they’ll pull a dish in different directions, and our red vs. green jalapeño comparison covers when to use each.
Need to shop for a recipe? According to USDA figures, one jalapeño weighs about 14 grams, and a cup of sliced jalapeños weighs 90. So a single pepper gives you about 2½ tablespoons of slices, and a little over six will fill a cup.
How to pick good jalapeños
Look for peppers that are firm, glossy and heavy for their size, with a fresh green stem. Skip any that are soft, wrinkled, bruised or moldy, since a wrinkled jalapeño is drying out, and it won’t have the crisp snap you want raw.
Does a bigger jalapeño mean more heat? Not necessarily, since some of the biggest jalapeños, like the Mammoth, were bred for stuffing, and they’re often milder than a standard pod. Others, like the TAM jalapeño, were bred to be mild on purpose. Our guide to jalapeño varieties sorts them by heat.
And those little white lines on the skin? They’re called corking, and you’ll hear that they mean a hotter pepper. When America’s Test Kitchen tested corked and smooth jalapeños side by side, the results were all over the map, so treat the lines as cosmetic. If your jalapeños keep coming up mild, here’s why your jalapeños may not be spicy.
How to cut a jalapeño
Put on a pair of food-prep gloves before you start. Uncut jalapeños are safe to handle, but once you cut into one, its juice gets on your fingers, and from there it can find your eyes later on. Then follow these steps:
- Rinse and trim: Rinse the peppers under cold water, then cut off the stem end.
- Halve it: Slice the pepper in half lengthwise so you can see the pale ribs and seeds inside.
- Scrape it out, or don’t: For a milder pepper, run a small spoon or the tip of a paring knife down each half to lift out the ribs and seeds. For full heat, leave them in.
- Cut it to size: Slice each half into strips, then cut across them to dice. For rings, skip the halving and slice the pepper straight across instead.
Stuffing them? Halved jalapeños make easy boats for cream cheese poppers. To stuff them intact, cut off the top just below the stem and work a paring knife around the inside to pull the ribs and seeds out in one piece, so you’re left with a hollow pepper.
When you’re done, wash your knife, cutting board and hands with soap and warm water. Capsaicin, the compound behind the heat, dissolves in fat rather than water, so plain water won’t shift much of it. If your hands start to burn anyway, our step-by-step for hands burning from peppers will help, and our guide to treating chili burn covers your mouth and eyes, too.
How to control a jalapeño’s heat
Most of a jalapeño’s heat is in the pale ribs that hold the seeds, not in the seeds themselves. In fact, the seeds carry very little. So the ribs are your dial: cut them all out for a mild pepper, leave some for a medium one, and keep them all for full heat. Want more than a jalapeño can give? Swap in a serrano for one or two of them.
Add jalapeños in stages, and taste as you go. Heat spreads as a dish cooks, especially when there’s oil or butter in the pan, so what’s mild at the start can be hot by the end. Temperature plays a part, too. A dish tastes hotter warm than it does cold, so a cold salsa can seem tame until it warms up on a chip. Our guide to how temperature changes a pepper’s heat has more on that.
Made it too hot already? Don’t panic, because our tips on making salsa less spicy and making sauce less spicy cover the fixes.
How cooking changes a jalapeño
Each cooking method changes a jalapeño’s flavor, and some change its heat, too. Here’s what to expect, and what each one is good for.
Raw
Raw jalapeños are crisp, bright and grassy, with all of their heat intact. That’s what you want in pico de gallo, guacamole, ceviche and on tacos. Dice them small so the heat spreads evenly, and use green ones for the classic fresh flavor.
Sautéed or stir-fried
A quick sauté softens a jalapeño and takes the raw edge off its flavor. But the heat doesn’t go anywhere, since capsaicin moves into the oil and from there into everything else in the pan, so the entire dish tastes hotter than one with raw jalapeño picked through it. This is how they work in fajitas, scrambled eggs and stir-fries like Thai beef with jalapeño and basil.
Roasted, grilled or charred
High, dry heat is the best trick for a jalapeño. Charring browns the grassy notes into something sweeter and smokier, and it’s the base of a roasted salsa. Does that tame the heat? It doesn’t, because a grilled pepper loses water, so what’s left is more concentrated, and by weight it’s hotter than when it went on the grill. We cover the numbers in our post on whether cooking makes peppers hotter.
Simmered in soups and sauces
Simmering pulls heat out of a jalapeño and into the liquid around it. In one study, jalapeños lost anywhere from about 10% to 52% of their capsaicin when they were cooked in water. In a soup or a chili, that heat stays in the pot, so the dish still gets it. But if you blanch jalapeños and pour off the water, some of the heat goes down the drain with it. For a creamy example, try our cream of jalapeño soup.
Stuffed and baked
A jalapeño’s thick walls hold up in the oven, and that’s made it the go-to popper pepper. Cheese and other fatty fillings tame the heat as you eat, so even a hot batch is easy to enjoy. Try our stuffed jalapeños with bacon or sausage stuffed jalapeños.
Fried
Sliced, battered and fried, jalapeños turn into a crispy, poppable snack with a soft, hot middle. Our recipe for fried jalapeño slices walks you through it, from slicing to frying.
Pickled and candied
Pickling trades the jalapeño’s grassy flavor for a bright vinegar tang and softens its crunch a little. A quick refrigerator pickle takes minutes and keeps in the fridge, and if you’d rather have jars for the pantry, here’s how to can hot peppers safely. Add sugar to the brine and you’ve got cowboy candy, sweet-hot rings that are great on burgers, cheese boards and cornbread.
Smoked and dried
Smoke and dry a ripe red jalapeño and it becomes a chipotle, which is a different ingredient entirely: smoky, deep and a little sweet. Our chipotle vs. jalapeño comparison explains how they differ, and our guide to drying chili peppers covers the methods.
How to roast jalapeños
Roasted jalapeños go into salsas, sauces, dips and sandwiches, and they take only a few minutes. You can use a broiler, a grill or a gas burner.
- Heat it up: Set the broiler or grill to high, or turn a gas burner to medium-high.
- Char them: Put the peppers, uncut, on a baking sheet close to the broiler, on the grill grate or right on the burner. Turn them with tongs until the skin is blistered and blackened in spots all over.
- Steam them: Move the hot peppers to a bowl, cover it, and let them sit for about 10 minutes.
- Peel and trim: With gloves on, rub off the loose skin, then pull off the stems and scrape out the ribs and seeds if you want them milder.
Don’t worry about getting every bit of skin off, because a little char left behind adds flavor.
What to pair with jalapeños
Jalapeños go best with fresh, green partners like cilantro, onion and tomatillo, which share their bright, grassy bite and make up the base of a green salsa. Cheese is their other best friend. Cheddar and cream cheese tame the heat, and that’s the idea behind poppers, while a squeeze of lime cuts it clean. Sweet things work, too. Mango, pineapple, strawberry and honey turn the heat into something craveable, as in our jalapeño mango salsa, and pork and bacon pair with it beautifully.
Want the full list? Our Chili Pepper Flavor Pairing Tool shows every jalapeño partner, sorted by how each one works with the pepper, and you can look up 40 other chilies the same way.
How to store jalapeños
Keep uncut jalapeños in the refrigerator crisper. According to Purdue Extension, hot peppers last up to 5 days on the counter and more than a week in the fridge. Once you’ve cut them, keep the pieces in a sealed container in the fridge and use them soon, since cut peppers don’t keep as long as uncut ones.
For longer storage, freeze them. Frozen jalapeños soften when they thaw, so use them in cooked dishes, sauces and salsas rather than raw on a sandwich. Our step-by-step for freezing hot peppers covers it, and if you’ve got more than you can freeze, pickling, canning and drying all work, too. Not sure whether a pepper’s still good? Here’s how to tell when peppers go bad.
Jalapeño dos and don’ts
- Do wear gloves when you cut jalapeños, and wash your knife, board and hands with soap afterward.
- Do taste a sliver from each batch before you decide how much to use.
- Do cut out the ribs to tame the heat, and leave them in when you want more.
- Do pick red jalapeños for sweetness and green ones for a bright, grassy bite.
- Don’t judge a jalapeño’s heat by its size or by the white lines on its skin.
- Don’t rub your eyes, even after the gloves come off. If it happens, here’s how to treat chili burn.
- Don’t pour off the cooking liquid if you want to keep the heat in the dish.
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Related reading
- Here’s What To Do With A Lot Of Jalapeños: Recipes and preserving ideas for a big harvest.
- What’s A Good Jalapeño Substitute?: What to use when you’re out, from milder swaps to hotter ones.
- Serrano Vs. Jalapeño: How the jalapeño’s hotter cousin compares on heat, flavor and uses.
I have cooked extensively using hot peppers and have grown several kinds. I always buy more than necessary at the grocery store because of the difference in heat. In general, jalapenos are not always hot at the grocers esp. during the winter months. It wasn’t until I read this article that I realized removing the seeds and leaving the membrane would really boost the flavor of a less than spicy jalapeno!
Thank you