Unique farm grows some of the world’s spiciest chili peppers
Joel Mowrey of Smoking J’s Fiery Foods says his farm in Candler’s Hominy Valley specializes in some of the hottest peppers in the world.
By Bill Evans
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CANDLER, North Carolina (WLOS) — Late September is harvest time for the hottest member of Asheville’s “Foodtopia” scene: the chili pepper.
Joel Mowrey of Smoking J’s Fiery Foods said the location of his farm in Candler’s Hominy Valley is ideal for growing them.
“We live in a very unique cove – or a bowl – where we’re surrounded by mountains on all sides. So we grow in a unique microclimate that has done real well for growing chili peppers,” he said.
Hot, dry days and cool, moist summer nights enhance the flavor profiles of several pepper varieties, grown each year on 12 to 15 acres.
“We really do a lot in the very spicy, or super-hot categories,” Mowrey said. “We kind of took off with the ghost pepper and the Trinidad Scorpion pepper as being two of the hottest peppers in the world that we really focused on.”
For large-scale production, Smoking J’s grows 18 varieties each season. Two unique and popular ones in the arsenal include the Datil, a hot and sweet variety from St. Augustine, Fla., and the Fatalii, a citrusy member of the habanero family from Africa.
Mowrey said his land was spared the damage that many farmers faced after Hurricane Helene, attributable in large part to drainage improvements made following Tropical Storm Fred in 2021.
Mowrey converted the former Candler Fire Department building on Pisgah Highway into a kitchen and production facility. Smoking J’s produces several sauces and seasonings there in addition to bottling and selling sauces and pepper mashes to other food companies nationwide.
“In any given year, we bottle 20-to-30,000 bottles of hot sauce,” Mowrey said. “And we sell our pepper mashes to just a wide variety, from very small manufacturers to some of the biggest co-pack companies in the country.”
Mowrey explained that America’s affinity for the hot and spicy is a relatively recent development in the culinary scene.
“Spicy foods have been on the rise for about a decade now, whereas, in years past, America was more of a meat and potatoes society. But now these days, there’s so much diversity in food. Kids, the young kids especially, have a hotter taste for it now than they ever did, but yeah, people like it hot,” he said.
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