In Indonesia, chili pepper is an important spice, and it is normally eaten fresh to increase appetite. It is consumed when it is still green but already mature, and for cooking spice, it is usually used when it is already red. People usually believe that mature red chili is more pungent than green one. Pungency has been known to be related to the capsaicin content of the chili fruit. In this research, the capsaicin content of 10 local Indonesian cultivars (G1, G2, G4, G5, G7, G8, G9, G10, G11, and G12) of chili pepper was measured. The ten cultivars have variations in fruit morphology and pungency. G1 is a dark green fruiting cultivar that the fruit is mostly eaten fresh; G2, G4, G5, G7 fruits are greenish white in color when still young and mostly used for spice, G8 is a greenish-white short fruiting cultivar with pungent taste, G9 and G10 are tiny fruiting pungent cultivars, G11 is dark green with big diameter cultivar which has a little bitter and pungent taste and G12 cultivar is a very pungent cultivar which has Capsicum chilense appearance. The highest capsaicin content was showed by G2 and G4, while still green (36.19 mg/g and 36.76 mg/g respectively) or already red (40.45 mg/g and 40.65 mg/g respectively). All the cultivars showed higher capsaicin content when the fruit already became red than the mature green fruit.

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J. Kusnadi, E. L. Arumingtyas, R. Mastuti and D. R. T. Sari, “ Variation of Capsaicin content of Local Indonesian mature green and red chilli pepper (Capsicum frutescens),” International Journal of Applied and Physical Sciences, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 29-34, 2017..