Calories in Peppers, poblano, seeded

What makes peppers so powerful?

The poblano takes its name from Puebla, Mexico, where it was traditionally cultivated. What many cooks don't realize is that this single pepper lives a double life: fresh and dark green, it is a poblano, but once dried it becomes an ancho — meaning "wide" in Spanish — and its flavor profile shifts entirely. Drying concentrates the pepper's natural sugars and introduces raisin-like, smoky, and chocolatey notes that are largely absent in the fresh version. This is not a different cultivar; it is the same fruit at a different water content. On the Scoville scale, poblanos register roughly 1,000 to 1,500 units, making them milder than jalapeños. The bulk of that heat resides not in the seeds themselves but in the placental tissue — the pale, spongy pith that anchors the seeds to the pepper's inner wall. Seeds absorb capsaicin through contact with this tissue, so removing both seeds and pith, as this entry specifies, strips away nearly all perceptible heat while preserving the poblano's signature earthy, slightly bitter flavor.