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September-October 2008
· Piquillo — Incredible Peppers for Everyday Eating
· Cristal — The Foie Gras of Peppers
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Piquillo — Incredible Peppers for Everyday Eating
 These have been at the top of every food list I've made — Spanish or otherwise — for ages. They're very special roasted peppers from Navarre, in the Basque Country in northern Spain. Grown in only 7 villages, they are, I think, more flavorful, than any roasted pepper I've ever had (with one exception, see right). Eaten on their own, Piquillos are a pretty amazing experience; the heat starts softly at the tip of your tongue and spreads out from there. I love these things and I use them constantly — in salads, on pasta, on sandwiches, on pizza, on pasta, with rice. In the Basque Country they stuff them with fish (fresh or salt cod), which is excellent (and also available on our shelves, made in Spain and ready for immediate eating). I like 'em stuffed with goat cheese from the Creamery (recipe in Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating). Omelets too. Laid out on a white plate in a pool of green-gold olive oil, they make for an hors d'oeuvre that's as good to look at, as it is to eat. Haven't tried them for dessert but maybe I'll add that to my to do list. As you can tell, I like them. A LOT. Piquillos are, I think, fast food at it's best. Open the jar and eat.
When we started with Spanish foods back in the '80s they were pretty much unheard of over here. Nowadays you can find jars that say "Piquillo" on the label in plenty of American shops. When I was traveling in the Basque Country, it was driven home to me with great clarity what I already should have known — not all Piquillos are the same. Here are couple things we look for when we buy that add up to a better tasting pepper:
The Denomination of Origin seal that assures that what is in the jar are really Piquillos. There are other peppers grown in the area which aren't bad but aren't Piquillos. One is the Pico — sounds similar, bigger in size, not bad, but not nearly as tasty. It also insures that the peppers inside have been packed only in their own natural juices, not in the diluting, lower cost water that some folks are now using.
Roasting over real wood, not gas. We've worked to make sure that what we're getting are the old style, wood-roasted peppers not the more modern version which isn't bad but is roasted over gas flames and loses some of the precious Piquillo character in the process.
You can, of course, taste the difference. It's not like lesser Piquillos are going to taste "bad." It's just that they'll be lacking some of the depth of flavor and fine character that make these things so darned good. If you doubt the difference, come by and ask for a taste of the real, wood-roasted, things.
You can purchase this Piquillo Peppers online at Zingerman's Mail Order
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Cristal — The Foie Gras of Peppers
In one of those good parts of globalization, I actually discovered these for the first time last year when I was in Australia. (So, let's see, peppers came from Central America, went to Spain with Columbus, were perfected there over many centuries, exported to Australia where they're found by an American from Ann Arbor, who goes to Spain to learn about them then brings them back to the American Midwest... ). I'd never heard of them even though we've been buying from the exact same supplier my Aussie contacts were for something like... twenty years! Let me tell you... if I were into regret and worrying (which I used to be as a youth but no longer am now), I'd expend a seriously enormous amount of energy feeling bad about how many jars of these incredible peppers I've missed out on eating over the last two decades. Granted, they're extremely expensive so they're probably not for everyday eating; like the really good tinned tuna, it's hard to imagine wanting to spend $$ on a jar of roasted peppers. But if you want to treat yourself to something really good...
Even in Spain, the Cristals are hard to come by. "Everyone makes Piquillos," one local told me. "But only a few do the Cristal." I guess that's sort of a given since I've managed to do twenty years of studying Spanish food and hadn't ever heard of them. Their high cost is, not surprisingly, tied to the rarity of the pepper, and even more so, to the labor involved in making them. "When it's roasted the flesh is so thin it's like paper," explained my local expert. "We use tiny little knives to scrape the skins off." And it's a lot of scraping — each little jar contains an entire kilo (over two pounds) of red peppers.
Although they come from the same area (Navarre), the Cristal (remember it's Spanish so it's pronounced "Kree-STAHL") is a completely different pepper from the Piquillo. In their fresh state the Cristal are actually larger, with four little bumpy points up at the top. After being picked each autumn they're roasted over beechwood as they have been for many centuries.
To get to the heart of the matter, to my taste, the Cristals are basically the foie gras of the pepper world. They're so super rich, so delicious, so good that I ate a whole jar's worth in one sitting while in Spain. Basically I ate 'em with a spoon, a touch of sea salt and a bit of olive oil. Slices of toast if you like. That's it. Although I had them served to me in a nice bowl, you could honestly eat them right out of the jar with a loaf of warm Paesano bread alongside to tear pieces off of. They're smoky, rich, very buttery, and very good. Something special to grace any table, Spanish or otherwise.
You can purchase this Cristal Peppers online at Zingerman's Mail Order
More reading — Check out two of Mark Kurlansky's excellent books for more on the Basques — The Basque History of the World and Cod: a Biography of the Fish that Changed the World.
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