Homemade Roasted Peppers and Busting the Myth of Bell Pepper Gender

Do you like paying extra money on ingredients you can easily make at home for a fraction of the cost?

Roasted Bell Peppers are one of those ingredients. If you have a broiler, toaster oven or grill, you can pick up some bell peppers when they are in abundance in summer time and store them for adding to recipes for months to come.

Homemade Roasted Bell Peppers are delicious on everything from salads to sandwiches and other main courses.

Don't limit yourself to bell peppers. You can do this for any type of pepper: hatch roasted chilies anyone?

Be sure to wear gloves for hotter chilies as the capsaicin can make your hands burn.

Mythbusters: Bell Pepper Gender

Recently, I got a few bell peppers off the clearance produce rack at the grocery store. As I was washing them I noticed one of the red peppers had three lobes and the other had four.

Immediately my mind rushed to the "myth of bell pepper gender" that is still making the rounds on social media and is accepted as fact.

So, I decided to attack the myth in the style of the old Mythbusters show:

There are three parts to myth.

Part 1: do peppers have gender? My hypothesis was this is ridiculous, fruit doesn't have gender. A little research gave me 10 pages of people repeating this myth without investigation and this gem from Foodreference.com

Peppers have complete flowers, that is both male and female parts in the same flower. *

Male and female fruit can only come from plant types that have separate male and female flowers, and with a few exceptions, only the female flowers produce fruit. (one of the exceptions -  some papaya male flowers will set fruit).

The number of lobes is related to the specific variety of pepper.  There are varieties of peppers that produce 2, 3-4, or 3-5 lobed peppers.  The 4 lobed 'bell' pepper was (and is) more popular in the U.S., so plants have been breed for this characteristic.

* (Pepper trees [black & white pepper] have separate male and female flowers).

I verified this a few more places but they started to get very scientific with lots of botany terms. This would be the part of Mythbusters where they speed up the sound so it comes out sounding blah blah blah.

I was partially correct. Apparently there are fruits that have gender, but bell pepper plants contain complete flowers and self pollinate so they aren't one of them. Go ahead and do your own research into plant reproduction if you desire, I am calling this part BUSTED!

Part2: "female" peppers produces more seeds.

Let's cut these babies open, shall we?

I admit it is a small sample size, one of each, and I did not actually count or weigh the seeds. But can we call this part BUSTED too?

Part 3: "female" peppers are sweeter. Again, this was asmall sample size, only one taster and I only took one bite of each since raw bell peppers don't agree with me since my pregnancy (weird, I know).

No difference that I could note. BUSTED.

So, based on the two bell peppers I tested and the 5 minutes of online research I was willing to waste on this inane topic, my conclusion is MYTH BUSTED!!

Now we get to the best part: the cooking!

---

Until next time, happy eating.
~Audrey