PROSPECT HEIGHTS — Mark your calendars, spice lovers.
The Chile Pepper Festival is coming back to Brooklyn for its 23 year in September, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden announced this week, with a full line-up of tastings, live music, a specialty food market and a “Tour-de-Chile” in the garden itself.
The all-day festival on September 26 is for chile fans of all ages with a pepper-planting workshop for kids and a marketplace for spicy desserts, the organizers said. Patrons will be able to buy chile-spiked yogurt, sriracha bars, hot-sauce-infused chocolate and chocolate mole.
Four musical acts from places that “prominently feature the chile in their cuisines,” will play throughout the festival, the BBG said. Those bands are Atlas Soul, a French-Algerian hip-hop group; the psychedelic rock and Cambodian pop group The Cambodian Space Project; zydeco players from Louisiana, Jeffery Broussard & the Creole Cowboys and a local Latin soul group, Spanglish Fly.
Of course, raw chiles will be part of the program too. Staff will lead the "Tour-de-Chile" though the BBG’s herb garden to highlight all the edible hot stuff they have growing, from bell peppers to one of the hottest peppers in the world — the “Trinidad scorpion” pepper — that clocks in at two million Scoville heat units. (A typical Jalapeño pepper registers up to 10,000 on the Scoville scale.)
The festival will take place between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. on Saturday, September 26 at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden at 990 Washington Ave. Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for students and seniors and free for children under 12. For more information, visit bbg.org.
