The Best Pepper

Clockwise from top left: wild-harvested Piper longum, white Piper borbonese, Piper borbonese, red Piper nigrum Kampot, Xanthoxylum piperatum Sancho. Center: Piper nigrum Tellicherry

If you read my salt post and thought my pantry was a little excessive, buckle the fuck up, because here we go.

I hope to holy hell that you do not believe that pepper is something that comes from a shaker, because we would need to have words. No, pepper is a God-gifted nugget delivering a pungent heat along with sweet or floral or citrusy or piney flavors. Or several of those flavors at once. Unlike chile peppers, the heat doesn’t come from capsaicin, but from the compound piperine.

In addition to piperine, pepper contains literally hundreds of other compounds, giving this spice a bouquet of aromas and flavors, as well as other properties. Antioxidant, antibacterial, prodigestive, anticancer. Yup, it’s a special little fruit.

You heard me right, fruit. It’s the fruit of a flowering tropical vine. When harvested at full ripeness, we get red peppercorns. When harvested before fully ripe and dried, black peppercorns. If those unripe berries are either freeze-dried or preserved in brine, we have green peppercorns. When harvested fully ripe, and soaked and fermented to remove the outer fruit, and then dried, we get white pepper. FYI, pink peppercorns are not pepper. They are dried berries that are more closely related to cashews than to pepper.

You might be thinking, “There are only four kinds of pepper: black, green, red, and white. What’s all this buckle-the-fuck-up shit?”

Wrong! We have barely begun to count the peppers!

Let’s get taxonomic. Piper is the genus or what we can accurately call pepper. Your typical black pepper is Piper nigrum, of the black/green/red/white discussion. From that same species, there are variations depending on the region the pepper is grown.

Botanical illustration of Piper nigrum.

Tellicherry, Kollimalai, Malabar, Shimoga, Rajakumari, Mlamala, all from India, along with subtly different varieties form the Cardamom Hills. Then there’s Sarawak from Malaysian Borneo. Abong from Sumatra, Indonesia. Kampot from Cambodia. Phu-quoc from Vietnam. Yupanqui from Ecuador. Belem from Brazil. Ceylon from Sri Lanka. Penja from Camaroon, a wonderful white pepper. There are more, and they all taste different and wonderful.

Piper nigrum. It’s a fruit, see?

All those varieties? That’s just Piper nigrum, folks.

Piper cubeba: cubeb, or tailed pepper, is grown mostly in Indonesia. It is harvested and dried much like black pepper, but with aromas and flavors of menthol and camphor and allspice.

Piper cubeba. Who doesn’t love the old-timey botanical print?

Piper guineense, or Ashanti pepper, is a West African species of pepper similar to cubeb. It is less bitter and more herbaceous. It is sometimes used in the spice mix known as berbere, although Ethiopian long pepper (see below) is more commonly incorprated.

Dried Piper guineense.

Long pepper comprises three different species that I know of. There may be more - I’m no expert. There is Piper longum from India, also know as pipli, Piper capense from Ethiopia, also known as timiz, and Piper retrofactum, the Balinese long pepper. They come from similar flowering vines as Piper nigrum, this time with tiny fruits, each about the size of a poppyseed, jammed together on a stalk. Compared to Piper nigrum, long pepper is considered more flavorful, with a slower onset heat and lingering flavor.

Dried Piper longum.

Now, if you looked closely at that first photo, you may have thought I was trying to pull one over on you. And you were right! Which of those kids is not like the others? Xanthoxylum! Not a “true” pepper, in that it isn’t in the genus Piper, but included because it’s rad!

There are several species in the Xanthoxylum genus that give rise to important culinary peppers. The most famous is Sichuan pepper, one of the ingredients in Five Spice powder. You may also come across Andaliman pepper, Mahkwan pepper, and Sancho pepper. These peppers all pack an amazing lemony scent and taste, and make your tongue go all numb and tingly. Cool, right?

I’ve saved my favorite for last. Piper borbonense. Is it The Best Pepper? If you have learned one thing from this post, hopefully it is that there can be no best pepper with all the world has to offer. This however, is my Best Pepper.

Part of the reason I put this baby at the end was that only the hardy souls who could make it this far would learn this magical secret. Because I don’t need a whole bunch of yokels buying up all the good shit. But if you’ve lasted this long, I figure you deserve it.

Piper borbonense is known as voatsiperifery where it is grown on Madagascar. It is a wild “tailed” pepper like cubeb. Harvested by hand, like truffles and diver scallops. It’s super complex and I love it so hard. I put it in a special grinder that I keep with the Himalayan salt. I only let the people I really really like use them.

What does is smell like? Pepper, sure. But it’s also earthier than typical pepper, with hints of cardamom and nutmeg. There’s also a floral/citrus thing happening in there that’s hard to put a finger on.

What does it taste like? For me, in addition to the pepper heat, there are sweet spices and lemony high notes. It’s got layers.

Maybe this will be your special pepper, too. Or maybe you’ll fall in love with the flavor profile of kampot, or timiz. Now imagine all those amazing subtle notes and grinding them over a simple lemon butter sauce or a plank of salmon or even a green salad.

The people eating your food may not know why it’s so good. They will probably just think you are a really fucking great cook.

You win.

The End.