Bring the Heat: A Spice Lover’s Guide to the Farmers Market
Sheree Bishop, Communications Coordinator
September 18, 2026
With the fall equinox just days away, the farmers market is approaching peak pepper season, with an abundance of fresh chile peppers for hot sauce makers and spice-loving home cooks to choose from. While you can always enjoy them raw, blending peppers into a handmade sauce or cooking them into your favorite meals can bring out new, bold, and delicious flavors with a kick.
What are some of the best ways to prepare peppers from the farmers market? Read on to hear from farmers and food makers who specialize in spice, and be sure to pay a visit to the Seasonal Spotlight booth this month to enjoy a selection of sweet, savory, and spicy pepper-filled recipes.
A Slow-Burn Summer for Locally Grown Chile Peppers
Over at Tierra Vegetables in Santa Rosa, farmer Lee James and her brother, Wayne, grow around 50 varieties of chile peppers. Unfortunately for those looking for particularly hot ones this year, the peppers that typically ripen around this time aren’t available yet.
“It’s been a slow season for us for chiles. We’ve had a cold summer with cold nights and two hot spells, but other than that, it’s been cool, and the peppers have not ripened yet,” Lee says, referring especially to their habanero varieties.
Though Tierra sells dried peppers, too, the remaining ones from last summer’s harvest have sold out. “The anchos ran out first. Because everybody knows it, it’s the most popular and it’s also the least productive. And none of [this season’s anchos] have started to turn red yet. They take a really long season,” Lee shares. Anchos, or dried red poblano peppers, are part of the Mexican “holy trinity” of peppers used to make mole and other sauces.
Toward the end of a more typical summer, chefs and shoppers flock to the booth for a variety of fresh chiles, including the Scotch Bonnet, a spicy staple of Caribbean and Latine cuisines, and the Calabrian chile, often used to add a slight kick to Italian dishes. The Jameses also use these peppers to make hot sauces, chile jams, and chile oils.
Though less common chiles have yet to arrive, jalapeños and serranos can be found at farms like Green Thumb Farms and Everything Under the Sun at the Ferry Plaza. Thai chiles are in abundance at farmers markets right now at GG Farms at the Ferry Plaza and Yang Farm at the Alemany market. Despite their small size, they have a bold flavor that you can soften by soaking them or removing the seeds.
Hot Sauces as Medicine: The Health Benefits of Eating Chiles
Found at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market on Saturdays, Chef Sarah Germany is on a mission to make hot sauces and fermented products that put together ingredients with anti-inflammatory and medicinal properties.
One of the hottest sauces on offer is her vegan-friendly Green Curry Sauce, featuring Thai chile peppers and serranos paired with Brussels sprouts, green beans, kale, broccoli, and then finished with curry leaves and makrut lime leaves.
“What makes the heat completely magical is that we process those chiles in three separate ways. Some of them got fermented in a vinegar brine. Some of them got roasted, and then some of them went in raw,” Sarah says. “It’s got all of that Thai curry feel to it, but it is hot.”
Through her hot sauce creation, Chef Sarah aims to make the most of capsaicin’s health benefits. In every chile pepper, there’s a compound called capsaicin that activates neurons that respond to heat. With a more intense flavor, eating spicy food can also encourage you to eat more mindfully. Studies show that people who prefer spicy food also eat less sodium overall, which carries its own health benefits.
“For example, Cayenne, which would be the pepper that’s in our Town Heat, primarily. We pair that with green tomatoes or tomatoes, which are really high in vitamin C. It improves your circulation. It helps protect blood vessels,” Sarah says. “It’s actually helping become a digestive aid, so that heat is not just going to burn you, but it is giving your whole body a kind of warmth.”
Creating Complex Flavors with a Kick
Karla Rosales Barrios, owner of Pass the Sauced, has been putting her own tasty spin on traditional Nicaraguan salsas for nine years. She is currently participating in a Building Equity residency at the Mission Community Market, offering her line of sauces, all made using a blend of chiles that includes serrano, jalapeño, and poblano, along with other peppers.
“I wanted to have the customer experience on their palate a kind of layered heat with other sensations, that slight sweetness with a little bit of tang,” Karla says.
Her goal is to create intentional flavors that complement a variety of dishes, including a collection of recipes that she has created herself. To make sauces available outside of pepper season, Karla undergoes a labor-intensive process to chop the peppers in bulk, blend them into a paste, and freeze them.
She says, somewhere in that process, the flavor of the chiles change: “When I opened a jar the other day, I said, ‘Oh, I cannot put 30 ounces of chile base in this particular salsa, because it’ll go from mild to medium-ish immediately, and in two months it’ll be close to hot.’”
There’s some science behind Karla’s experience: a pepper’s perceived spiciness is about more than its amount of capsaicin. The aroma of the peppers can also affect how you taste them. The more the pepper’s cell walls break down, the more the aroma can change. In a study of frozen bell peppers, pureed peppers released a stronger aroma than whole peppers, and after the puree was frozen, the aroma got even stronger when thawed.
When cooking peppers at home, Karla recommends blending your peppers into a relish or blending them with tomatoes for a sweeter flavor. If you’re looking for some inspiration on how to use your peppers, you can always stop by the Seasonal Spotlight booth at the farmers market to take home a different peppery recipe each week, like Muhammara and Pepper Relish.
If you’re curious about specific peppers that you can find in the market, check out our farmers market guide to peppers and stop by the farmers market during our Pepper Celebration on September 26 to learn more about the unique varieties currently in season.
Visit Tierra Vegetables and Chef Sarah Germany at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market on Saturdays, and Pass the Sauced in the Mission Community Market on Thursdays.
Topics: Farmers market, Vegetables