Are Male Bell Peppers Better for Cooking?

Have you heard that male bell peppers are best for cooking? And that the females are sweeter but full of seeds?

Wrong! It's a myth. There are no male or female bell peppers; they have no gender.

Bell peppers grow from blossoms that have both male and female parts, and each pepper is produced through self-fertilization. These fruits of the pepper plant each contain ovaries that produce the seeds after pollination; those seeds will potentially become new pepper plants.

The bell pepper sex myth claims that male peppers have 3 lobes and female peppers have 4 lobes, which is how you find the sweeter females at the market.

Truth is, sweetness is more a factor of ripeness than sex. Bell peppers start out green, then ripen to yellow, then orange, then red, and in some cases turn purple. Thus red, orange, yellow, and purple bell peppers are generally sweeter than green bell peppers.

And the lobes on peppers are determined by growing conditions and genetics, so they don’t indicate the sweetness factor or sex of the pepper in any way.

Source: Ohio State University Extension

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