Last night as Molly and I were walking through a new neighborhood market my eyes bulged out as we passed thousands of containers of roasted peppers, tomato sauce, tapanades, pestos and various stock. wow and double wow! HOG’s going in the condiment business next week!! The dollar amount spent on luxury food goodies is on the grow and consumers are shelling out the bucks without even doing the cha-cha.

Now a lot of the folks that we work with at Hands On Gourmet might not want to crank up the food processor, bar blender or wait hours slowly simmering a sauce but a roasted pepper? its a thing of understated beauty that is soooo simple to do and so quick to make. Before summer is over and all the peppers are gone I’d like to share with you some tips on how to roast the perfect pepper. Great results and a good way to save a few bucks!

Now there are 2 basic ways to skin a pepper. One is roasting the peppers over an open flame and the other is roasting them in a hot oven.

Open flame method: turn on a burner to medium high heat and place the pepper on the grate above the flame. Make sure that the pepper isn’t directly on the flame as it won’t allow even roasting. As the skin of the pepper starts to bubble and blacken rotate it until all the skin is the same color, black and charred… and don’t worry, you won’t ruin the flesh. When it’s done roasting place it in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. This is when steam gets in between the flesh and skin allowing them to separate. (this takes between 10 to 15 minutes).
The next step is to take it out and pull the stems out. Place the pepper on a flat work surface and pull the skin off with your fingers. Split the pepper open with a pairing knife and use the back side to scrape out the pith and seeds. A big big big no no is to rinse the pepper under water. It might help wash away some of the skin, seeds and pith but it also rinses away the flavor! Ok your all done!

Oven method: turn on your oven to 500 degrees. Line a baking pan with parchment paper (the reason you do this is to save a lot of clean up later), place the peppers on the pan and put in the hot oven. Some folks brush with oil but it really doesn’t matter. Watch the pepper and pull when it becomes black and bubbly. Repeat the steps above.

One of my favorites is a grilled chicken sandwich with roast red peppers, basil, mayo, a squeeze of fresh lemon and thinly sliced red onions.

Happy roasting! From Chef Stephen

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 10:42 am and is filed under Tips and Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.