Capsicum annuum ‘Santa Fe Grande’ and related Santa Fe types
Santa Fe peppers are thick-walled yellow-wax chiles that ripen from pale yellow through orange to red. They are generally mild to moderately hot, with a fruity pepper aroma behind the capsaicin.1
A useful oddity
In Spanish, güero can mean blond or fair-haired, which makes sense of the pale-yellow fruit and the alternate name “chile güero.” The changing colors can all appear on one plant because each fruit is at a different stage of ripening.
Plant notes
The glossy surface is a real part of how the pepper holds water. New Mexico State researchers compared the fruit’s cuticle and epicuticular wax with other pepper cultivars while studying post-harvest moisture loss.2
Connections
Santa Fe peppers and Hungarian wax peppers are similar-looking C. annuum wax types. Smoking either adds a separate layer of phenolic smoke aroma; it does not create the chile’s underlying heat.
Footnotes
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Cornell Cooperative Extension, “Santa Fe Grande Peppers,” accessed July 17, 2026. ↩
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N. K. Lownds, M. Banaras, and P. W. Bosland, “Relationships Between Postharvest Water Loss and Physical Properties of Pepper Fruit,” HortScience 28, no. 12 (1993): 1182–1184. ↩