Serrano

The serrano is the chilli Mexico reaches for when a jalapeño isn't enough. It looks like a slimmer, more pointed jalapeño — 4 to 6 cm of smooth green fruit, borne in quantity on a plant that keeps producing — and it carries several times the heat, arriving fast and clean rather than building. Almost all of them are eaten green and raw; left on the plant they ripen through red, and sometimes brown, orange or yellow depending on the strain. It is the second most used chilli in Mexican cooking after the jalapeño, and the one that makes pico de gallo taste like pico de gallo.

History & lineage

The serrano comes from the mountains of Puebla and Hidalgo in eastern Mexico, and it is named after them: sierra means mountain range, and a serrano is someone or something from it. It was being grown in those highlands long before it had a name in any European language, and unlike most chillies that travelled, it never really became something else somewhere else.

What it did do was scale. Veracruz, Sinaloa, Nayarit and Tamaulipas now produce something in the region of 180,000 tonnes of serranos a year between them, almost all of it for the domestic market and the fresh-salsa trade. That is the tell: this is not a collector's chilli or a sauce-maker's novelty but a staple vegetable, bought by the bagful and used the same week.

It has stayed a cooking chilli rather than a breeding one. There is no serrano equivalent of the habanero's colour variants or the jalapeño's dozens of named cultivars, because nobody has had much reason to change it. In Britain it is one of the more rewarding annuums to grow: quicker than a habanero, hotter than the jalapeño it resembles, and prolific enough that a single plant will keep a kitchen in salsa from August onwards.

Culinary uses

Raw, mostly, and green. Chopped fine into pico de gallo, salsa verde and guacamole, where its flesh holds its shape rather than dissolving; simmered whole into salsas and then blended; sliced over tacos and soups. It takes well to pickling and to a quick char under a grill, but it is wasted dried — the walls are too fleshy to dry cleanly, which is why you meet chipotle and ancho on a spice shelf and almost never a dried serrano.

Growing it in the UK

Annuum is the forgiving group, and the right place to start. Seed germinates readily in warmth, the season is short enough to finish outdoors in a good summer, and February to early March is soon enough to sow. 80 days to maturity is an ordinary season here — sow in February and it will ripen without a fight.

At 50–150 cm it is one of the tall ones — a greenhouse border, a cane in from the start, and room to lean. The record puts the yield at heavy, so start feeding weekly with something high in potassium as soon as the first fruit sets — a plant carrying that much will run out of steam otherwise.

Read from this variety's own record — the figures are in the panel opposite.