Banana vs Pepperoncini

Both are wax peppers. Oregon State University Extension puts Banana, Hungarian Wax and Pepperoncini in one group: cone-shaped fruit with a thin waxy skin, ripening from pale yellow through orange to red. The extension separates them by surface. Banana and Hungarian Wax pods are smooth. Pepperoncini pods are wrinkled. That wrinkle is the fastest way to tell a jar of one from a jar of the other.

The Banana is an American garden and market pepper named for its shape, and the name means the sweet type unless a label says Hot Banana. North Carolina Cooperative Extension puts the sweet Banana at 0 to 500 Scoville units and notes that Pepperoncini get mistakenly grouped with them. The Pepperoncini has a thinner skin, and nearly the whole crop goes into pickling. The database lists it under Golden Greek and Tuscano, the two trade names on most seed packets and jar labels, and both point to the same thing: a mild pickling pepper from Italy and Greece, not the hot chili an Italian means by the word.

That last point trips people up. In Italian, peperoncino is the diminutive of peperone, and the Treccani dictionary defines it as a small, thin, elongated pepper, green or red, notably spicy, eaten fresh, pickled, or dried and ground. In Italy the word covers hot chilies in general. The American Pepperoncini is one specific, barely warm selection out of that family. Ask for peperoncino in Calabria and you will not get what comes on a Greek salad.

On the plate the two swap freely. Both go onto sandwiches and antipasto plates, both come pickled in brine, and neither carries heat that anyone past childhood will notice. The Banana has thicker walls and more crunch, which is why it also sells fresh, sliced raw or stuffed. The thin, wrinkled flesh of the Pepperoncini takes up brine faster, which is why it is rarely sold any other way. Oregon State puts the wax group as a whole anywhere from sweet to 15,000 SHU, but that top end belongs to Hungarian Hot Wax, not to either of these.

Sources

• Oregon State University Extension: Grow Your Own Peppers (EC 1227)
• N.C. Cooperative Extension, Henderson County: A Plethora of Peppers to Pick
• Treccani, Vocabolario: peperoncino