Black Cobra Pepper, aka Goat's Weed Pepper

A colleague gave me two starts of this pepper right around tomato-planting time this summer.  They were tiny, just a few leaves each, and they looked about what I would expect for a pepper that grows pointing up.  I popped them in the clay ground with some compost mixed in as soon as it was warm for peppers, one with more sun and one with more shade and water, and gave them the normal amount of neglect. These stalks with wonderful silvery fur started reaching up and pointing to the sky with pepper fingers. 

This was enough information to identify the plant, the only Capsicum Annuum with hairy leaves and stems, and it is originally from Venezuela.

This looks like an ornamental plant but the peppers are good for greenish heat when young, then they turn black and then red and the green flavor gives way to a straightforward round heat. They have enough flesh to taste better than ornamentals and the flavor changes from greenish bitter to a kind of clean heat.  I usually cut out the seeds (most of the heat) when eating them, the raw pepper sidewalls are just thick enough to give a little crunch when you eat them raw but my favorite is slivered and mixed into something warm enough to cook them a bit.  I bring all of my extra peppers to a colleague from south India and she told me about a recipe which is my new favorite use for this pepper.  Cook garlic, onions, lots of coconut flakes, cumin, and slivered Black Cobra peppers.  Mix it with whatever you want, I used rice, nuts, bitter mellon, and some mild squashes and the hot/sweet/bitter/starchy mix was pretty great.   I am sure that these plants like bright sun because the low-water plant still made at least a dozen peppers, but the one with more water did best so they certainly don’t mind a little care.