Two Varieties of Sweet Hungarian Peppers

I got an email a month ago from Tom Huber, of Otto's Hungarian Import Store & Deli, in Burbank, asking me if I knew where he could find some "Hungarian style sweet yellow peppers." Attached to the email, he included a photo of small, tapered, yellow, wax-type peppers, and explained why he was interested in finding them. "We used to have a farm in Northern California that used to farm fresh Hungarian Peppers for us.  We imported these seeds from Hungary to the USA several decades ago.  That farm went out of business and we have never been able to get our peppers back into our store since that time or find them again." Intrigued, I've been searching the markets ever since for sweet Hungarian peppers. I've found plenty of hot peppers that looked like what Huber wants. But none that are sweet. Until today.  In fact, I found two types of peppers billed as sweet Hungarian yellow peppers, the bell-type peppers from Beylick Family Farms, in Fillmore, and the wax-type peppers from Windrose Farm in Paso Robles. Neither is sugary sweet. But neither has a trace of heat. So we'll call them sweet. But are the bell peppers really Hungarian? Well, the color is right. But by all accounts that I could find in a quick search via Google, the classic Hungarian yellow pepper is the conical wax-type, tapered pepper. See, for instance this report from on the scene in Eastern Europe, published recently in the San Francisco Chronicle. This article resolves another mystery, the question of whether real Hungarian yellow peppers are hot or sweet. Answer: They can be either, or anything in between. In fact, according to Dave DeWitt and Nancy Gerlach, in the The Whole Chile Pepper Book, Hungarian wax peppers have "the widest heat range of any chile'' -- from zero to eight on the Heat Scale.

Price: $2.50/lb. for bell-shaped
$2/lb. for conical peppers

multi-colored bell peppers

Price: $2.50/lb.

Yellow "Lipstick" Peppers and Pimento Peppers

Red lipstick peppers have been one of my perennial, late-summer favorite sweet peppers for years. Today, I came across these, on the Beylick Family Farm table, billed as "yellow lipstick peppers." I was skeptical. They aren't the same shape as red lipsticks, which are more thick-skinned, compact and uniformly conical in shape. So I Googled "yellow lipstick pepper," and voila, came up with this, an image on a photographers page, which appears to be taken at a farmers market, peppers just like the ones I bought, labelled "super sweet yellow lipstick peppers." Still skeptical about whether these really are lipsticks, I checked Cornell University's Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners page, which did nothing to allay my suspicion. Lipstick peppers are described, exactly as I have known them, as a "sweetheart pimento type" peppers with "4-inch, tapered, medium-thick" pods "maturing to glossy rich red." Still trying to keep an open mind, I cut a slice from one of these so-called yellow lipstick peppers and took a bite. "So-called," indeed. They're about as thick and fleshy as a lipstick pepper. They're quite good in fact, and fairly sweet. But they aren't as sugary sweet as the real thing.

Price: $2.50/lb.