Flavor of the Week: Serrano peppers, packing heat

It may be easy to confuse jalapenos and serrano peppers; both are relatively similar in shape, they hail from Mexico, and they even share similar flavor notes. But, as Datassential notes, the smaller serrano pepper packs a punch with a Scoville Heat Unit of 10,000 to 20,000 compared with the jalapeno’s 2,500 to 10,000.

Spot serrano peppers anywhere you would expect a hot pepper to appear. They can be raw, roasted, pickled and dried, and on menu items from toppings to salsa. They’re the hotter cousin of jalapenos hailing from the mountainous states of Mexico.