In France, pepper is the spice most used to spice up dishes. Pepper sauce is a great classic to accompany red meats. Although pepper is the most popular spice, it is little known. In addition, there are usurpers called “false peppers”. We take stock.
One pepper can hide another
Real pepper comes from the pepper plant of the “Piper” species, literally pepper in Latin. This plant is a vine whose berries are harvested from clusters. There are different Piper pepper plants: nigrum, longum, cubeba and bordonese.
Pepper from Piper nigrum is the most commercially available. It is also the origin of red, green and white pepper. These four colors correspond to different stages of maturation and processing: green at the start of maturity, black just before maturity (in reality yellow at this stage, it becomes black thanks to the drying of the berry), red at full maturity and finally white also when fully ripe (the red berry soaked in salt water then dried becomes white).
This is misleading, we might think that they are different peppers with these colors, when they are actually the same pepper.
The pepper family is restricted. False peppers are there to provide a vast culinary choice.
Real resemblance, fake pepper
False peppers are not part of the Piper species. Berries are usually harvested from a tree or shrub instead of a vine.
What Piper peppers and fake peppers have in common are their pungent flavor and appearance. However, they come from distinct plants. Among the best known, we can obviously cite Sichuan “pepper”, Jamaican “pepper”, Tasmanian “pepper” and even Guinea “pepper”.
If fake peppers and real peppers are not part of the same species, they can be combined in a dish. The 5 berry blend is a great example. This mixture contains three levels of maturity of black pepper (white, black, green), pink pepper (schinus molecular) which can be found under the name “pink peppers”, and Jamaica pepper.
It’s up to us to test and create other blends with these spices.
