Late September is harvest time for the hottest member of Asheville's "Foodtopia" scene: the chili pepper. Joel Mowrey of Smoking J's Fiery Foods said the location of his farm in Candler's Hominy Valley is ideal for growing them.
"We live in a very unique cove – or a bowl – where we're surrounded by mountains on all sides. So we grow in a unique microclimate that has done really well for growing chili peppers," he said. Hot, dry days and cool, moist summer nights enhance the flavor profiles of several pepper varieties, grown each year on 12 to 15 acres.
"We really do a lot in the very spicy, or super-hot categories," Mowrey said. "We kind of took off with the ghost pepper and the Trinidad Scorpion pepper as being two of the hottest peppers in the world that we really focused on."
For large-scale production, Smoking J's grows 18 varieties each season. Two unique and popular ones in the arsenal include the Datil, a hot and sweet variety from St. Augustine, Fla., and the Fatalii, a citrusy member of the habanero family from Africa.
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