Fried peppers

In much of southern Spain, you can buy long, thin peppers, which look like an overgrown chilli. In fact they are ‘sweet’ and the locals tend to cook them on a plancha, which is essentially a sheet of well-seasoned steel, that's placed at one end of the barbecue. Hot coals are swept under it and the metal gets extremely hot. When the peppers are cooked like this, the skins char and the core and seeds cook to a delectable softness and do in fact, taste positively sweet. They’re unbelievably good with lots of coarse salt ground over them. Occasionally, one of the peppers is spicy hot, which causes much amusement, when the greedy diner has bitten a huge chunk off the end. Lacking a large barbecue and plancha, I suggest cooking them in a more mundane frying pan.  They are sublime as a starter, because you just have the peppers alone and can really appreicate the flavours.  The long, thing ones (sometimes sold as Romano) are full of scalding hot juice - be careful! - which is totally delicious and can be mopped up with bread.

Although they’re common in both Spain and South America, these slender peppers are not easy to find elsewhere. However, ordinary peppers make a good second best, although the seeds don’t cook the same way and aren't usually worth eating. You can also find miniature peppers which taste equally appetising when cooked this way - seeds and all.

Roast peppers have become very popular recently, and many people cook them over the barbecue. Nothing, however, quite matches the searing heat of a hot plancha or frying pan. 

Serves 4 as a starter 

 

12 Spanish peppers or 4 peppers

olive oil

coarse sea salt

 

Method:

• Wipe the peppers.  If using ordinary perppers, quarter them and remove the seeds.
• Heat the oil to smoking hot in a heavy frying pan. Put in the (pieces of) pepper(s) and toss them in the oil. If you think you're going to overload the pan, cook them in batches.
• Using tongs, keep them moving so that most of the skin gets burnt and almost blackened. The inside should soften at the same time.
• Remove the cooked peppers and keep hot. Add more to the pan (with extra oil, if necessary) and repeat the process until such time as all the peppers are cooked.
• If you’ve nowhere to keep them hot, chuck them all back into the pan, after the last ones are cooked, so that they’re reheated.
• Serve with plenty of salt and some fresh bread to mop up the oil and juices.