Peppers Capsicum annuum
Blister the skin black over flame, then steam it covered — the skin slips off in sheets.
8 recipes on this site
In the kitchen
Under heat
Direct flame chars the skin without overcooking the flesh underneath — that's the whole point of blistering them before peeling.
Against air
Cut peppers dry out at the cut face within a day, but the skin holds moisture in well otherwise, longer than most vegetables.
In storage
Keep them in the crisper, whole and dry. Cut pieces should go in a sealed container, not loose.
At the shop
Riper (red, orange, yellow) peppers are sweeter than green ones — green is just an unripe pepper, not a separate variety.
Which variety, for what
- Green bell
- Unripe — more bitter and less sweet than the same pepper left to ripen.
- Red / yellow / orange bell
- Fully ripened — noticeably sweeter, which is why they cost more.
Beyond the kitchen
COLOUR IS RIPENESS
Green, yellow, orange and red bell peppers are frequently the same fruit at different stages. Green are picked unripe, which is why they are cheaper, firmer and noticeably more bitter. Red are fully ripe and sweetest.
NO HEAT BY DESIGN
Bell peppers carry a recessive gene that switches off capsaicin production entirely. They are the same species as cayenne and jalapeño — the only difference is that one mutation.
A GLOBAL RESHAPING
Capsicum reached Europe in the 1490s and Asia within decades. Hungarian paprika, Korean gochugaru, Sichuan cooking, Thai curry and West African stews all postdate 1492, and none of those cuisines existed in their current form before the Columbian exchange.
THE PIMENTO IN THE OLIVE
The red strip stuffed into a green olive is pimiento, a sweet pepper. It was originally hand-cut and inserted; most is now a pepper purée set with a gum and machine-injected.
A longer history
Capsicum peppers were domesticated in Central and South America at least six thousand years ago, with the earliest firm archaeological evidence from Mexico. All the peppers on a modern supermarket shelf — sweet and hot — descend from wild American species that no one outside the Americas had seen before the 1490s.
The sweet bell pepper is a comparatively late selection, bred for size, wall thickness and the absence of heat, and developed substantially in Hungary and the Balkans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The blocky four-lobed supermarket pepper is a Dutch glasshouse product of the later twentieth century.
Peppers are now grown on every inhabited continent and are among the most transformative crops in culinary history. Few foods have been adopted so completely and so fast: within a century of leaving the Americas they were fundamental to cooking in India, China, Korea, Hungary, West Africa and Southeast Asia.
