Capsicum annuum ‘Hungarian Wax’
Hungarian wax is a long, tapered pepper that begins pale yellow and ripens through orange to red. It resembles a banana pepper, but many strains carry appreciable chile heat.1
Northeast notes
Like other peppers it is a frost-tender crop, but its relatively early maturity lets it fit a Northeast growing season when plants are started ahead. The pale fruit is not necessarily unripe in the everyday market sense: yellow is a normal harvest stage, while further ripening changes color and flavor.2
A useful distinction
“Wax” refers to the smooth, waxy-looking skin and the yellow-wax pepper type, not to a coating added after harvest. Heat can vary between seed strains and individual fruits, so the name describes a cultivar family more reliably than an exact Scoville number.
Connections
Hungarian wax and Santa Fe peppers are both yellow-wax forms of C. annuum. Their similarity is visual as well as culinary, but they come from different regional breeding histories.
Footnotes
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University of Florida IFAS Extension, “Pepper Production,” accessed July 17, 2026. ↩
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University of Maine Cooperative Extension, “Vegetable Varieties for Maine Gardens,” accessed July 17, 2026. ↩