Cherry Pepper Scoville, 0 SHU Sweet to Hot

A small round pepper, sweet or hot, grown for jars and stuffing.

By the Scovidex teamUpdated Oct 18, 202610 sources

A small round glossy red cherry pepper with a short curved green stem, on a soft peach circle.

Short answer

No heat in sweet types

Hot large cherries run hotter than a jalapeño, milder than a serrano
Round fruit 1–1.5 inches across, green ripening to red
About 85 days to maturity on a compact, ever-bearing plant

Heat: 0 SHU¹
Species: C. annuum¹
Flavor: Sweet¹
Days to harvest: 85¹
Uses: Pickle, roast, stuff¹

On this page

1How hot is a cherry pepper?
2Is your cherry pepper sweet or hot?
3What does a cherry pepper look like?
4How do you pickle cherry peppers?
5What else can you do with them?
6Can you grow cherry peppers?
7What goes wrong with cherry peppers?
8Is a cherry pepper the same as a pimento?

How hot is a cherry pepper?

It depends on the type in your hand. The NMSU Chile Pepper Institute sells a sweet red cherry pepper and lists it as no heat at all¹. Hot cherry types exist too, and they will bite you: Virginia Cooperative Extension calls large cherry peppers very hot, milder than a serrano but hotter than a jalapeño².

So two peppers with the same round shape can sit at opposite ends of your spice rack, and you can't tell them apart by eye. Clemson Extension draws the same line, filing sweet cherry with bell and pimento and large cherry with cayenne and habanero³.

What each source says about cherry pepper heat
Pepper	Heat	What the source gives
Sweet red cherry	No heat	A plain statement, no SHU number
Cherry, as most gardens grow it	Mildly spicy	Flavor note: sweet, slightly tart, no number
Large cherry	Very hot	Hotter than jalapeño, milder than serrano, no number
Cherry Bomb	Hot	Listed as a hot hybrid, no figure
Cherry cultivar, lab sample	51,156 SHU	One sample, figure tied to dry weight
Jalapeño, for scale	2,000–8,000 SHU	Range, average about 5,000

Put the jalapeño and serrano figures together and a large hot cherry lands somewhere above 8,000 SHU and below the serrano's 10,000 to 25,000⁴. That reading comes from the extension's comparison, not from a lab test, so we keep our index chip on the sweet type, which gives you a firm answer.

Why does the one lab figure read so high?

Because the lab weighed the pepper dry. A 2022 study measured a cherry cultivar from local growers at 51,156 SHU, and the authors note that their SHU values relate to dry weight⁵. A fresh pod is mostly water, so the same capsaicin spreads through far more weight by the time you bite into one.

Here is a rough worked number. Cayennes grown in an NC State study held about 81 to 82 % water⁶. If a cherry pod holds about the same, one gram of dry pepper comes from about five grams of fresh pod, and 51,156 ÷ 5 gives roughly 10,000 SHU on fresh weight. That estimate is ours, built on two sources, and it agrees with the extension view of "hotter than a jalapeño".

A sweet cherry has no heat; a large hot cherry tastes about like a hot jalapeño or a mild serrano.

The hotter round hybrid has its own entry: the Cherry Bomb pepper.

Is your cherry pepper sweet or hot?

Check the label first, then your tongue. Shops and seed racks sell both under "cherry pepper", and the pods look alike, so the name on your packet tells you most of what you need.

Five checks before you cook a cherry pepper

The packet or jar says sweet, or a named sweet type such as Red Cherry Sweet: expect no heat.
It says hot, large cherry or Cherry Bomb: expect jalapeño-plus heat.
It says only cherry pepper: treat it as unknown until you taste a sliver.
Cut a thin slice from the side wall, away from the white ribs, and taste that first.
Then taste a scrap of rib; the ribs hold most of the capsaicin, so they tell you the pod's top heat.

The rib test works because of where the heat sits. A 2024 review puts about 89 % of a pod's capsaicin in the white ribs⁷. If the rib scrap barely tingles, you have a sweet cherry, and you can use the whole pod freely.

If your crowd shies away from heat, the sweet type is the safe pick for stuffed appetizers. If you want a jar of hot rings for sandwiches, buy or grow a large hot cherry.

What does a cherry pepper look like?

Like a small red ball on a short stem. The fruit is round, 1 to 1.5 inches across, and starts green before turning red as it matures¹.

A green and a red cherry pepper side by side on a garden table, both round and about the size of a large cherry tomato.

Sizes and flavors vary from one variety to the next, and you usually pick them once they turn orange to deep red². When you harvest, cut the stem with snips instead of pulling, because pepper stems snap and can take a branch with them³.

How do you pickle cherry peppers?

With a tested vinegar brine and a boiling-water canner. The National Center for Home Food Preservation publishes a hot pepper pickle that leaves small peppers whole with slits cut in them, which is exactly the shape of a cherry pepper⁸. Its tested list names Hungarian, banana, chile and jalapeño, so treat round cherries as small whole peppers under that recipe and keep its amounts as written.

1
Slit the peppers
Wash them, leave small peppers whole and cut 2 to 4 slits in each so the brine gets inside. Wear rubber gloves for hot types.⁸
2
Blanch or blister
Blanch them in boiling water, or blister them in a 400 °F oven or under a broiler for 6 to 8 minutes, then cool and peel off the skins and flatten the small ones.⁸
3
Make the brine
Simmer 5 cups of 5 % vinegar, 1 cup of water, 4 teaspoons of canning salt, 2 tablespoons of sugar and 2 garlic cloves for 10 minutes, then lift out the garlic.⁸
4
Pack and fill
Pack the peppers into half-pint or pint jars, pour hot brine over them and leave half an inch of headspace.⁸
5
Process
Adjust the lids and process in a boiling-water canner for the time your elevation needs.⁸

The full recipe uses 4 pounds of hot peppers and 3 pounds of sweet ones and yields about 9 pints⁸. For a mixed jar, your sweet cherries can stand in for part of the sweet weight, and your hot cherries for part of the hot weight.

Boiling-water processing time for pickled hot peppers, half-pints or pints
Your elevation	Process time
0 to 1,000 ft⁸	10 minutes
1,001 to 6,000 ft⁸	15 minutes
Above 6,000 ft⁸	20 minutes

A glass pint jar packed with whole slit red cherry peppers in pale vinegar brine on a wooden pantry shelf, two loose peppers beside it. — Slit whole cherries let the brine reach the inside, so the jar pickles evenly.⁸

What else can you do with them?

The Chile Pepper Institute names roasting and stuffing beside pickling for its sweet red cherry¹, and a fermentation study adds a fourth use for hot ones:

Roasting. NMSU's chile guide roasts pods at 400 to 450 °F for 6 to 8 minutes, turning them often, until the skin blisters; cut a small slit first so steam can escape⁹. A round cherry rolls, so you'll turn it with tongs more often than you would a long chile.
Stuffing. Cut off the top, scoop out the seeds and ribs, and you have a cup about 1 to 1.5 inches wide¹. Pulling the ribs also pulls most of the heat from a hot cherry⁷. More shapes that hold a filling are in peppers for stuffing.
Fermented paste. In the 2022 study, a blended cherry paste fermented for 21 days at 20 °C turned acidic, and its capsaicinoids stayed stable⁵. You keep the heat and gain sour, which gives you the base of a fermented sauce.
Freezing. NMSU freezes whole chiles at 0 °F or below for up to 12 months, in flat packs no deeper than 2 inches⁹. Thawed peppers lose their crunch, so you'll use frozen cherries for cooking and paste, not for crisp pickles.

Other good jar peppers are in peppers for pickling.

Can you grow cherry peppers?

Yes. The plants are compact and ever-bearing, so they keep setting fruit through the season instead of giving one flush, and the sweet red type matures in about 85 days¹.

70–85daystransplant to harvest, most peppers³

12 inbetween plants, rows 3 ft apart³

70–85°Fbest daytime temperature³

45–50°Ffridge storage, two to three weeks³

Clemson gives 100 to 120 days if you start from seed in the ground, so most of us buy transplants or start seed indoors³. Set plants out only after the last frost; Virginia Extension starts seed six to eight weeks before that date². The planting date guide works out the week for your area.

In the fridge, fresh pods keep two to three weeks at 45 to 50 °F with high humidity³. That's warmer than most of our fridge shelves, so your crisper drawer is the best spot.

What goes wrong with cherry peppers?

Most problems you'll meet show up either in your jar or on your plant, and each has a plain cause:

Flowers drop and no fruit sets. Virginia Extension links blossom drop to nights above 75 °F or a plant carrying too much fruit at once². Wait for cooler nights; the plant sets again. The pepper plant with no fruit page walks through the other causes.
A dark, sunken patch on the bottom of the fruit. That's blossom-end rot, a calcium problem that usually starts with uneven watering³. Keep the soil evenly moist, not soaked.
Lots of leaves, few peppers. Clemson points to too much nitrogen³; ease off the fertilizer.
The jar came out hotter than you planned. You probably packed hot cherries with their ribs. Next time, scoop the ribs from half the pods before you pack them⁷.
Hands burn after cutting a batch. NMSU suggests rubber gloves or a thin coat of solid fat on your hands, and a vinegar soak if the sting starts⁹.

Is a cherry pepper the same as a pimento?

No. The UC Master Gardeners of Ventura County describe the pimento as sweet, mild and heart-shaped, and the cherry as round, mildly spicy and slightly tart, the one to pickle¹⁰.

Cherry pepper

Pimento

Round, 1–1.5 inches across¹ShapeHeart-shaped, conical²¹⁰
None in sweet types; large cherries very hot¹²HeatSweet and mild¹⁰
Pickling and stuffing¹¹⁰Best known forUsed red and fully ripe²

The pimento and cherry pepper side by side lines up their shape, heat and uses in more detail.

Against a jalapeño the answer splits by type. A sweet cherry has none of the jalapeño's 2,000 to 8,000 SHU⁴, while a large hot cherry runs hotter than it. The cherry pepper and jalapeño comparison covers both, and when your store has neither, the cherry pepper swap list gives you replacements with amounts.