elpie-
i understand it's pepper roasting time
in new mexico ...
Thursday » September 11 » 2003
Heat or sweet
Roasted, fried, stuffed or marinated, peppers give us a great variety of culinary choices
Judy Schultz
CanWest News Service
Peppers come in a variety of shapes and colours, some sweeter and hotter than others.
This time of year I get serious about peppers, which I roast by the oven-load and use all winter in the most delicious pasta sauces and a couple of killer spreads -- think of roasted eggplant, roasted garlic, roasted peppers, all whizzed together with a generous bash of fresh herbs. Delicious.
Now, on the sweeter side of autumn, the bell peppers are amazing. The mature green bells are big and already sweetening. Sunbursts of fully ripe red, orange and yellow bells are mild, fleshy, apple-sweet -- so juicy they spurt.
Finally, there are the nearly chocolate-black purple bells that turn green when you cook them.
A PEPPER PRIMER
Bells, the sweeter side of peppers: Members of the genus Capsicum, bell peppers are loaded with vitamin C, and offer a good hit of vitamin A.
Fleshier and a world sweeter than chilies, they come in dozens of varieties with intriguing names like sweet chocolate, vidi, friggitello, lilac and golden summer. We use bell peppers, the sweetest of them all, for roasting, stuffing, frying, marinating or eating raw.
Hungarian wax, Cubanelle, corno di toro, banana: These other sweet peppers are more tapered, elongated and sometimes curved, with thinner flesh and a sweet-hot flavour. Many are good for stuffing, or dipping in batter and deep-frying. (Some cookbooks class these as chilies.) They're also terrific as part of a pan of Italian sausage fried with sweet bell peppers.
Cherry bells, baby bells: These mini-bells are sweet-hot, full-flavoured and juicy, good for pickling or for stuffing with a savoury cheese mixture as a zingy appetizer.
Chilies, the pungent pods: Chilies, also a member of the genus Capsicum, take me back to a farmers' market, in Santa Fe, N.M. You can hear the snap and pop of roasting chili seeds as the flames lick the long green pods and the hand-cranked roaster goes round and round.
"Nothing smells better than the burning skins of these peppers," says Deborah Madison, restaurateur and author of several cookbooks in praise of vegetables.
"In New Mexico, it's our equivalent of burning fall leaves."
Good cooks line up for big bags of roasted chilies to take home for tamales, to stuff for chilies rellenos, or chop into a fresh green salsa with tomatillos, garlic and a good whack of cilantro.
Chilies are the original sizzlers, their relative heat measured in SHU: Scoville heat units -- Scovilles, for short.
The heat comes from the capsaicin they contain. As well as packing a great whomp of flavour -- or possibly pain, depending on the SHU level and your individual tastebuds/pain receptors -- capsaicin is being used in experimental treatment of certain diseases, such as high blood pressure and arthritis.
There's a good selection of hot fresh chilies in local markets now. Cayennes, poblanos, serranos, anaheims, cascabels, Hungarian cherries and Hungarian wax (Gypsy) peppers were found in several markets last week.
If you're cooking with them for the first time, be warned: Even a relatively mild chili can be hot enough to burn, even blister, so wash your hands with soap after handling them, and do NOT touch your eyes, mouth or any tender appendage until you've scrubbed up.
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HOW HOT IS HOT?
The relative heat in chili peppers is measured in SHUs: Scoville heat units -- Scovilles, for short.
Most chiliheads say the habanero, a.k.a. Scotch bonnet, is the hottest, with 200,000 to 300,000 SHUs.
Running neck-and-neck are the tiny green and red bird chilies from Thailand.
The many varieties of cayennes land somewhere in the middle.
Tabasco chilies rate a mere 50,000 SHUs.
Those pizza-friendly jalapenos, mild by comparison, top out at only 4,500 SHUs. |
