Call me what you like: a spicy junkie, capsaicin addict, but nothing beats the Habanero for its unlimited uses.
If you can stand the heat, the Habanero has amazing flavor and surprising health benefits.
Join me in taking a journey through the origin, heat, flavor, nutrition, and uses of the ever-popular Habanero pepper.

Quick Facts
Habanero Scoville: 100,000 – 350,000 SHU
Habanero vs Jalapeno: 12 to 100 times hotter than a Jalapeno
Species: Capsicum chinense
Heat: Very Hot
Flavor: floral, sweet, crunchy, and bursting with heat
Seeds: Buy Habanero Seeds

Heat Ranking
Habaneros are considered very hot to the general public, however, there are 100’s of peppers MUCH hotter in a category called super hots. Typical Habanero peppers range from 100,000 to 350,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU) which is anywhere from 12 to 100 times hotter than a Jalapeno.

Ghost peppers and Carolina Reaper peppers are off-the-charts hot at 1 million and 2.2 million scovilles respectively.
Back in 1999, Guinness ranked the Habanero as world’s hottest pepper. This doesn’t mean hotter peppers didn’t already exist, they just weren’t known by the populous.
Grocery store habaneros tend to be slightly less spicy than home grown peppers.
Heat of peppers vary with:
Growing conditions
Watering schedule
Climate
Plant genetics
Stress on the plant
Ripeness at harvest time
Commercially grown habaneros are typically picked before the pods are completely ripe. Under-ripe peppers aren’t as spicy and will not increase in heat once plucked from the plant.
Ever had a habanero from the grocery store with little to no heat? This is why.

Habanero Origin – Brazil
Origin
The ancestors of the habanero looked vastly different than the domesticated pepper you recognize today. The habanero originally started as a small wild chile pequin. After thousands of years of breeding and cultivating, the wild pepper has evolved into the blazing pepper you see in grocery stores today.
The habanero pepper origins dates back as far as 8,500 years ago from the Brazilian Rainforest in South America. From here, the Mayans traveled up Central America to Mexico bringing their peppers with them.
Habaneros are deeply ingrained in Mexican culture. Yucatan, Mexico is now the largest producer of Habaneros in the world, exporting to the United States, Europe and Asia. Yucatan’s unique soil composition, climate, and unrelenting sun make it the perfect location to grow these spicy peppers.

Yucatecan Habaneros
These growing conditions make Habaneros from Yucatan vastly superior in flavor and heat than grown anywhere else.
What’s in the Name?
The Habanero also has origins in the Caribbean islands. The name Habanero means “from Habana” which is in reference to the Cuban city La Habana or known in the US as Havana, Cuba.
In the 18th Century (1700’s) the Spanish were responsible for spreading these seeds all over the world with their network of trading, eventually reaching Europe, Africa and Asia.
This is how the scientific name, Capsicum chinense, came to be. A Dutch botanist, Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, incorrectly named it after China because of its popularity in Chinese cooking.