Be Aromatic Organic Cayenne Pepper

We all think we know Cayenne Pepper. Here are a few interesting tid bits to share over meals.

1. The fruit is high in iron and vitamins A, C, E, K, and several members of the B Complex.

2. Botanically speaking, the pepper is a berry, not a vegetable

3. On the Scoville scale cayenne comes in at 30,000-50,000 units. The Scoville unit was named for the American chemist who created it. William Scoville developed a way to quantify the heat in a pepper in 1912 by testing for the level of capsaicin. The scale runs from 0-1,000,000. The ghost pepper is currently the highest at 1,000,000 and the Bell pepper comes in at 0.

4. The Capsicum genus is believed to have been domesticated almost 6100 years ago and to have originated in Mesoamerica. It's old. Very very old.

5. Black, white, and green pepper, often called peppercorns, are not related and are in a different genus called Piper and the family, Piperaceae