This curated crop is hot stuff
The heat is on for Chez Nous Farms
Some people are partial to Frank’s
Red Hot.
When Shirley Ladouceur wants to add heat and flavour to her food, she breaks out her stash of homegrown Chimayo pepper powder.
“I put it on everything,” Ladouceur said. “I even carry it in my purse. I bring my own chili peppers to restaurants.”
This summer, though, she wants to bring her chili peppers to the people of Niagara.
The certified organic farmer who runs Chez Nous Farms in Stevensville with her husband Rick is offering a hot pepper CSA, promising to deliver curated biweekly orders of at least 35 different chilies, including the New Mexican Chimayo, to heat seekers and endorphin junkies between mid-July and November.
CSA, short for community supported agriculture, is a subscription to a farm’s harvests. Members sign up early in the growing season, giving farmers the capital to plant and sow the year’s crops. They then receive weekly shares of vegetables as a return on their investment.
Ladouceur has offered a regular CSA, packed with heirloom tomatoes, peppers, leafy greens, squash and other veggies for the past several years.
This year, though, thanks to a love of growing the often feared, maligned and misunderstood chili pepper, Ladouceur added a dedicated hot pepper option. It seemed kinder than overwhelming her regular CSA customers with her fiery crop, or having them get lost in the shuffle at the St. Catharines Farmers Market, where the couple also sells their produce.
“When I grow tomatoes, I grow 100 different kinds. I put them in a bin and Rick takes them to market and sells them,” Ladouceur said. “With hot peppers, he doesn’t know what all of them are and they don’t get the spotlight.”
Ladouceur has been a fan of spice since she started growing hot peppers professionally in 2010. She became a real cheerleader of the chili last summer, however, after a deal fell through with a Toronto restaurant to grow fiery varieties she sourced from around the world.
“I was excited about growing all these peppers. I was brainstorming and I thought there’s got to be other people who like hot peppers.”
And so the Chez Nous Farms “Chile Peppers of the World CSA” was born. It will include the likes of the mild to medium poblano pepper and the hot Peruvian Aji Panca, which Ladouceur loves sprinkled on avocado.
“It’s flavour,” she said. “I’m not about burning my mouth off.”
Still, there will be those varieties, too. Lining the walls of her plant nursery are photos and descriptions of each pepper she’ll grow, in ascending order of their place on the Scoville heat scale.
Among them is the Scotch Brain, a super hot pepper that looks the part with its bumpy complexion and sinister mushroom cloud shape. There’s also the 7 Pot Brain Strain, which comes in at a whopping 1.4 million Scoville units.
“They’ll probably get something like this once or twice,” Ladouceur said.
But there are others revered around the world as much for their flavour as the heat they pack. The Portuguese piri piri, the Syrian Aleppo 37, the Turkish Urfa biber, and the Mexican guajillo are also in Ladouceur’s flow chart of pain.
“It feels like when you have your hockey card collection out,” she said proudly as she admired her display.
Others are lesser known, but no less exalted, including the datil, described as similar to the habanero but with a sweeter flavour. It’s popular in St. Augustine, Fla., and honoured with an annual festival and cookoff. Fans claim it’s one of the tastiest hot peppers on the planet.
“It’s not like a tomato. You don’t have a Green Doctor Tomato Festival whereas peppers mean something to different cultures and they celebrate them,” Ladouceur explained.
Still, for the faint of heart, biweekly deliveries might seem like a daunting amount of Scovilles. Ladouceur is keeping CSA membership small to start but she’ll happily double weekly orders for those who can stand the heat.
Ladouceur stays on top of her own harvests by making salsa, or drying and crushing peppers into portable powder to eat anywhere with anything.
“I really made the effort to get authentic. I did a lot of research,” she said. “I look at them and to me, it’s a bunch of different spices, and they shouldn’t be thrown into a bucket at the market.”
Visit cheznousfarms.com to sign up for the hot pepper CSA or to learn more.