Bell pepper, a carnival of colors

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Whether it be raw, cooked, hot or cold, savored fresh in bite-size snacks, in mixed salads or ice cream or simply baked to a golden color in the oven, bell pepper summer fruits and vegetables are easy to cook.

Growing bell pepper

Bell pepper is an annual plant in temperate climates. The bell pepper plant can grow up to 16 or 20 inches (40 to 50 cm) tall and bears small white flowers that will transform into fruit.

All bell peppers are green at the beginning and their color changes as they ripen (red, yellow, purple and even black!).

There are three major bell pepper varieties. The square one, with thick, crunchy, fleshy walls, the rectangular one which is most often found on market stalls, and the triangular one, which isn’t so common and is either mild or slightly spicy.

Almost all the bell peppers sold on the market are grown in greenhouses, some of them heated greenhouses. Those grown in the open field are usually sold to food processing.

• Read also: all our tips on how to grow and care for bell pepper

Bell pepper varieties worth growing

Beyond colour, bell pepper cultivars differ in fruit size, wall thickness and how big the plant gets, which matters as much in a pot as in a greenhouse bed. Here are widely available varieties and what each one is best at.

A little bit of history

Native to Central America where it has been domesticated and grown for thousands of years, bell pepper is actually part of… the pepper family! It was most likely grown for the first time in the Mexican isthmus where seeds over 5,000 years old have been found during archaeological research.

The XV^th century is when chili (which was bred into bell pepper) spread to Europe but it took three more centuries for minds to accept it and the XVIII^th century is when cultivation really took off.

• Botanically, the tomato is a berry, a fleshy fruit formed from a single ovary, yet in cooking it is treated as a vegetable and served in savoury dishes rather than desserts.
• The name misleads too: bell pepper has no kinship with black pepper, Piper nigrum, the confusion dating from Columbus bringing the American plant back to Spain.
• Peppers belong to the nightshade family alongside tomatoes and aubergines, a shared botany unrelated to their differing geographic origins, so avoid replanting peppers in a bed that has just carried either crop.
• In sweet peppers, non-pungency — not sweetness itself — is the recessive trait (pun1) selected for over generations, so seed saved from a plant cross-pollinated by nearby chillies can yield hot fruit.

Cooking bell pepper

To select the freshest bell peppers, choose those that have taut blemish-free skin, without any wrinkles. They must feel firm and weighty.

The more mature a bell pepper, the redder. Green bell pepper is most crisp, fruity with a touch of bitterness, while red is mild and almost sweet. Yellow bell pepper is tender, mild and juicy.

• Read also: Bell pepper health benefits

• Roast or grill bell peppers until the skin blisters and blackens, then cover them while still hot so the steam loosens the peel and it slips away.
• When preparing citrus, scrape out the white pith along with the seeds, since citrus pith is bitter; in chillies, by contrast, the pale inner membrane carries capsaicin heat rather than bitterness.
• Cut a bell pepper along the natural ribs between its lobes to get broad, nearly flat panels that lie steadily in a pan or across the bars of a barbecue grill.

Green, red or yellow: which bell pepper for which dish

Colour is simply a matter of how far the fruit has ripened, and it changes both the taste and the texture on the plate. Here is what each stage brings to a dish.

Whichever colour you pick, choose fruits with taut, blemish-free skin that feel firm and weighty.

Keeping bell peppers

Bell pepper keeps for up to 8 days in the vegetable compartment of your refrigerator.

At room temperature, they tend to dry up and wrinkle. They keep best in an airtight plasticware, washed with the seeds removed.

• Red peppers spoil faster than green ones, so eat them first.
• Bell pepper freezes without blanching: deseed it, cut it into strips or dice and bag it, then cook it straight from frozen because thawed flesh turns limp.
• Check the crisper drawer every few days and remove any pepper with soft, sunken spots, since contact rots such as Botrytis gray mold and bacterial soft rot can spread to touching peppers.
• Peppers that have been roasted and peeled keep a few days in the fridge in a sealed jar, covered with olive oil.

Preparing bell pepper

Bell pepper can be savored in many ways: cooked, baked, marinated, sweet or salted, it blends into all sorts of dishes.

Want to add some crunchy crispiness to your starters and summer mixed salads? Add it raw! Cooked, it pairs well with zucchini and eggplant to become the legendary ratatouille.

It is often eaten stuffed in different parts of the world.

Marinated in olive oil, bell pepper will make for delicious antipasti, a starter much appreciated in Mediterranean diets.

And come barbecue season, it squeezes itself between chunks of meat or salmon kebabs.