The Italian frying pepper, the one everyone grew up with

There’s a pepper almost everyone has eaten at home and very few people can name: the
Italian frying pepper. Thin, long, pale green and with skin so fine you eat it
unpeeled.

It isn’t the same as the big, square green pepper of salads, even though in many greengrocer’s they
sit side by side. And the difference shows the moment you put the two in the same pan.

What sets it apart

The key is the thickness. The Italian has walls so thin that in the pan it softens straight away and
browns without turning tough. A thick pepper needs far longer and ends up leathery outside and raw
inside.

Nor should it be confused with the Padrón pepper, which is much smaller, eaten whole in two bites
and famous for occasionally being hot. The Italian is considerably longer — fifteen to twenty
centimetres — and gets cut into strips or served whole alongside meat or eggs.

When it’s in season

From June to October, at its best between July and September. It’s a heat plant,
and in the Ribera it’s what, along with the aubergine, fills the months when there isn’t a single
citrus to pick: when the orange trees are loaded with green fruit,
the market garden is the only thing coming off the
land.

How to choose one

• Firm and stiff. If it bends like a glove, it has lost water.
• Smooth, glossy skin, with no wrinkles or soft patches.
• Pale, even green. Ones starting to turn red are sweeter, but they soften
  sooner.
• A green, fresh stalk. Dry and dark means it was cut days ago.
• Light. Unlike fruit, a heavy pepper usually has thicker walls than you want.

How to fry them properly

It looks like there’s nothing to it, and yet most of the complaints — that they spit, that they come
out oily, that the skin peels off — come down to three details.

Dry them thoroughly

The number one cause of spitting. The water from washing turns to steam the moment it touches hot
oil and jumps. Washed and dried with a cloth, one by one.

Prick them or make a cut

A whole pepper is a closed bag full of air and moisture. As it heats, the pressure rises and it
bursts, with boiling oil around it. One prick with the point of a knife before they go in prevents
it.

Hot oil, but not smoking

Medium-high heat. If the oil is lukewarm, the pepper absorbs it while it warms up; if it’s smoking,
the skin burns before the flesh softens. The sign is that they sizzle when they go in, not that a cloud
comes off.

Salt at the end

Salting them first draws out water and drops the pan’s temperature. Coarse salt over the top once
they’re out, which is also where it sticks best and shows most in the first bite.

What to do with them

• Fried, with egg. The classic: fried peppers, an egg on top and bread. Nothing else
  needed.
• With garlic, in strips. Over a low heat until they collapse, and they go with
  everything.
• In a ratatouille, with aubergine, which is in
  season exactly the same months.
• Roasted and peeled, in strips with oil and salt. With such fine skin, it comes
  away by itself after fifteen minutes covered out of the oven.
• Stuffed, if they’re among the thicker ones in the batch.

The roast pepper trick

As they come out of the oven, put them in a bowl and cover it with a plate. The steam they give off
loosens the skin by itself, and in fifteen minutes it comes away with two fingers. With the Italian it
works even better than with the big red pepper.

And if one is hot

It happens now and then and it’s disconcerting, because the Italian is one of the sweet ones.

Peppers produce capsaicin — the compound behind heat — as a defence, and a plant
that has been through extreme heat or a lack of water can raise its production. In a batch grown
outdoors, the odd piece can come out hot with nothing being wrong.

It’s exactly the same phenomenon as Padrón peppers, where some are hot and some aren’t. In field
fruit and veg, variation between pieces is normal: it’s set out in
why untreated fruit doesn’t all look alike.

Green or red: it’s the same pepper

It’s one of those things that surprises people: the green pepper and the red pepper of the
same variety are the same fruit at two moments. Green is the fruit still unripe; red is that
same fruit once it finishes ripening on the plant.

What changes as it ripens

• The sugar rises. A red pepper is clearly sweeter.
• The grassy note softens, that green flavour a lot of people dislike.
• Vitamin C increases, which grows during ripening.
• And it softens. It keeps fewer days and spoils sooner.

Why it’s picked green

For two practical reasons. One, that green the plant produces more: every fruit left to ripen fully
holds back the next ones. And two, that green it stands transport and storage considerably better.

In a seasonal batch some pieces usually turn up starting to turn, with reddish patches. It isn’t a
fault and they aren’t past it: they’re the ones that stayed a little longer on the plant, and they’re
usually the sweetest in the box. Worth eating before the green ones, though.

And if you want them to ripen at home

It half works. A freshly cut green pepper goes on turning off the plant if left somewhere warm, but
it doesn’t gain the sugar it would have made on the bush. It’s the same story as fruit cut too early,
set out in what seasonal fruit means.

How to keep them

• In the fridge, a week to ten days, in the salad drawer and not in a sealed
  bag.
• Outside, three or four days somewhere cool.
• Unwashed until you use them. Moisture spoils them faster than anything.
• Away from apples and tomatoes, which give off ethylene and soften them.

Freezing them

Here’s the good news: peppers freeze well, and they’re one of the few vegetables that hold up
raw. Washed, dried, stalk and seeds removed and cut into strips, they go into a bag
and come out loose. Six months. Thawed they lose their crunch, so they’re for stews and sofritos, not
salads.

Fried they freeze too: cooked, drained and in portions. It’s the best way out when the plant crops
heavily all at once, which is what the market garden does: it doesn’t produce at a steady rate, it
produces in waves, which is why one week there’s none and the next there’s plenty.

Ours

The Italian frying pepper is picked in Albalat de la
Ribera through the warm months and leaves for your home within 24 or 48 hours, with no cold store and
no waxing — that shop-window shine on some shelf vegetables is
wax, just as it is on fruit.

They arrive in different lengths and thicknesses, because the plant doesn’t give two the same. They
are in the vegetables section while the season lasts, along with the
aubergine, the Chinese cabbage and the two squashes.