Chilli growers bring the heat to Scotland

IT AIN’T half hot, mum. A mother and daughter team in Fife have set up Britain’s most northerly chilli farm – growing some of the world’s hottest chillies in an unusually cool climate.

Patricia Galfskiy, 50, and her daughter Stacey, 25, established their company Chillilicious in December 2010, creating chutneys and oatcakes made from their own homegrown chilli peppers. The business has grown so fast they have bought an extra two and a half acres of land to grow their exotic crops.

“At the moment we have probably just over 500 plants and I’m in the process of planting a lot more,” said Patricia. “We have one polytunnel and later in the year we’ll put up a second one, which means next year we’ll be able to expand our chilli-growing hugely.”

Among the chillies the pair have grown are milder varieties such as jalapeno and apache, as well as the Trinidad moruga scorpion, which was ranked last year as the hottest chilli pepper in the world. It scores over two million on the Scoville scale – the official measurement for spicy heat in a pepper. The side-effects of eating such fiery peppers can include sweating, tears, a runny nose and the dilation of blood vessels.

Paul Bosland, a renowned pepper expert and director of New Mexico’s Chile Pepper Institute, said of the super-hot chilli: “You take a bite. It doesn’t seem so bad, and then it builds and it builds. So it is quite nasty.”

Patricia said: “We wanted to have a wide variety of chillies to show off how different they are, from mild to very hot. If we’re using the hotter chillies we’ll use only one for a whole batch of chutney, otherwise they become too hot to eat.”

The company – which also produces a range of chilli-inspired art painted by Stacey –currently use most of their crops for their range of chutneys and chilli and coriander oatcakes, but are hoping that their increased crop will mean they can send their chillies further afield.

“I’m hoping that soon we’ll be able to supply farm shops in Fife and the farmers markets,” said Patricia. “We’d also like to dry the chillies and smoke them. Dried chillies bought in the shops are expensive and they’re all shipped in from abroad, so it’s not very sustainable. We’d like to be able to produce something similar that’s on people’s doorsteps and is more local.”

The pair recently received almost £5,000 from the Scottish Funding Council to allow researchers at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh to look into the nutritional values of the food they are making and how to develop their product range.

Sheena Devlin, innovation manager at QMU, said: “We will be conducting nutritional analysis of the company’s existing product range. We will also be running focus groups with the aim of gaining valuable information which will help to inform the development of the company’s future product line.”

Stacey said the research would have huge benefits for the company. “There’s so much to get to grips with when trying to grow a business,” she said. “We are really excited about working with the Queen Margaret team and about the next stage in the development of our unique business.”

Chillies were, until recently, usually grown in hotter climates. However, they can be grown both indoors and outdoors in the UK. While numerous Scottish homes now boast an indoor chilli plant, they can be grown outside using unheated polytunnels. Some farmers have experimented with growing them outside in the winter months under garden fleece to give them protection from frost.

The pair are also hoping to bring the first chilli festival to Scotland.

“We go to quite a few of the chilli festivals down south and we’re working with Dundee City Council to encourage them to incorporate a chilli village at the Dundee Food and Flower Festival in September, which would allow us to have our first chilli festival in the country,” said Stacey.

The two are confirmed chilli lovers who have always enjoyed the spicy delicacy.

“We want people to realise there is more to chillies than just how hot they are,” said Stacey. “Lots of chillies have different types of flavour: some are sweet, some are sour, you get some with apple-like tastes and even pineapple flavours. There is a lot more to a chilli than just the heat involved.”