Shishito vs Padrón

The Padrón has a paper trail that most peppers lack. Díaz, Núñez-Fernández and Veloso (2023) record that Franciscan monks brought seed from Tabasco, Mexico to the convent of Herbón, in the municipality of Padrón in Galicia, in the seventeenth century, and the regulatory council for the protected name adds that dried, ground pepper from Herbón was already being traded by the late 1700s. The specification for the Protected Designation of Origin Pemento de Herbón has been in force since July 2009 according to Spain's agriculture ministry. It requires fruit picked green at 3.5 to 5.5 cm long and no more than 2 cm across. The Shishito is Japanese, its name means lion's head for the wrinkled tip, and it is izakaya food, blistered and served with soy or ponzu.

Both are famous for the same trick: mostly mild, occasionally not. The Galician saying is 'uns pican e outros non', some are hot and some are not. Estrada and colleagues (Scientia Horticulturae, 1999) grew Padrón plants in a greenhouse in La Coruña under three watering regimes and found more capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin in the fruit of water-stressed plants. Díaz and colleagues add that fruit gets hotter late in the season, in September and October, and on older plants. For the Shishito, Kondo and colleagues at Shinshu University (Molecular Genetics and Genomics, 2021) found that fruits with few seeds swung widely in capsaicinoid content while many-seeded fruits stayed reliably mild, and that eleven capsaicinoid genes tracked the heat. The hot one on the plate is usually a fruit that set few seeds or came from a plant under strain.

The ranges in the table say the Padrón runs hotter even when it is behaving, 500 to 2,500 SHU against 50 to 200 for the Shishito. In practice a mild Padrón has a grassy, faintly nutty flavor with a little bitterness, and a hot one is a genuine jolt. A Shishito is sweeter, thinner skinned and softer, and its hot fruit is a surprise rather than a shock.

These two substitute for each other on menus more than any other pair here. Both are Capsicum annuum, picked immature, thin walled, cooked whole in hot oil and eaten by the stem. In Galicia the plate is pimientos de Padrón with coarse salt. In Japan it is shishito under soy. The difference is that the Spanish pepper tastes more like a pepper and the Japanese one tastes more like a vegetable. Which one you want depends on whether you came for the roulette.

Sources

• Díaz, Núñez-Fernández & Veloso, Padrón Peppers, Some Are Hot, and Some Are Not (IntechOpen, 2023, DOI 10.5772/intechopen.110435)
• Estrada, Pomar, Díaz, Merino & Bernal, Pungency level in fruits of the Padrón pepper with different water supply, Scientia Horticulturae 81(4):385-396, 1999
• Consello Regulador DOP Pemento de Herbón: El pimiento
• Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación (Spain): DOP Pemento de Herbón
• Kondo et al., The pungent-variable sweet chili pepper 'Shishito' (Capsicum annuum) provides insights regarding the relationship between pungency, the number of seeds, and gene expression, Molecular Genetics and Genomics 296:591, 2021