Packin Heat
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Capsicum frutescens

Cakra Putih

Cultivar Indonesia
Scoville Heat Units 82,500
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About this pepper

Cakra Putih is an Indonesian cabai rawit cultivar sold through PT BISI International under the Chia Tai Seed or Cap Kapal Terbang branding. It is a popular non-hybrid market variety known for its strong branching, upright habit, and reliable fruit set, and Indonesian grower and seed-trade sources describe it as suitable from lowland to highland conditions in both rainy and dry seasons. It is also repeatedly described as tolerant to anthracnose and resistant or tolerant to thrips and aphids, which helped make it a favoured farm and market type rather than a novelty pepper.

Morphological descriptions place the plant as a small shrubby Capsicum frutescens, usually about 60 to 110 cm high, with a dark green stem, green lanceolate leaves about 5 to 8 cm long and 2 to 4 cm wide, pale green petioles about 3 to 4 cm long, white flowers, and upright fruiting. A 2026 breeding paper using Chia Tai material measured Cakra Putih as one of the smaller commercial entries in that trial, with a stem length of about 29.73 cm, canopy diameter of about 74.30 cm, fruit length about 2.80 cm, and fruit diameter about 6.1 mm.

The fruit is long, slim, and pointed with an upright position, and live commercial descriptions usually place it at about 3 to 4 cm long and 5 to 7.5 mm wide. Its immature pods are the feature behind the name, appearing white yellow to pale creamy yellow before shifting through orange-red and finishing bright red at full maturity. Sources also describe the fruit as hard, very seedy, very pungent, and able to handle storage and transport well.

Cakra Putih sits within the Indonesian rawit putih tradition, the pale-fruited bird pepper type commonly used for sambal and seasoning rather than for thick-fleshed fresh-market use. Indonesian overviews of rawit place white rawit at the lower end of the main rawit heat order, with rawit varieties running from about 82,500 to 480,000 SHU, giving Cakra Putih a level of heat that is still firmly in the very hot range despite being milder than the fiercest Indonesian rawit types.