All this talk about seeds reminds me of the year we started our first garden and planted bell peppers from seed. We carefully coddled the little seedlings and planted them in the garden and they grew like weeds with what looked like the seed pod on the outside. I was intrigued, and waxed on to all my non-gardening friends about how interesting it was that peppers grew from the seeds outward. When I finally mentioned this to a gardener friend, though, she took one look and plucked my coveted plants out of the ground. Turns out we’d been coddling weeds.

Yes the seeds are bitter, though you wouldn’t really know it with the heat overpowering all else. To experience it though, taste the seeds in a sweet one, like a bell pepper. They are bitter too.

As to the heat of the seeds, what IO wrote is what they taught us back in culinary school, and every seed I’ve every tasted from a hot chile was significantly hotter than the chile itself. Guess that could be because you have to cut the flesh to get at the seeds?

“Scoville unit is essentially a dilution factor. You take 1 g of jalapeño and put it in ~5000 g water (5 L)and you can no longer perceive heat in the water. Pure capsaicin is 17 million Scoville.”

So that would take 17,000 liters (nearly 4,500 gallons) to eliminate the heat sensation from just one gram of pure capsaicin. Whoa.