Pepper Tart
- Alison Haines
- Jul 4, 2016
- 2 min read
I'm a pepper tart! Probably something I shouldn't admit publicly but, why not? This is only a recent phenomenon. As a kid, growing up in 60's suburban Australia, there was thing called white pepper that hid in salt and pepper shakers on our dining room table. I don't remember ever using it. Don't even remember wanting to. I think it tasted like hot dirt.
The 80's ushered in all sorts of food from so many countries and it started to filter down through the restaurants to the supermarkets and into our homes. One of these treasures was pepper. Large wooden pepper mills started appearing on restaurant tables, theatrically churned by a waiter who would ask, "Cracked pepper, Madam?" Cracked what? I didn't make the connection between the "hot dirt" and the fabulous flavour and freshly cracked pepper ground onto a piece of fillet steak then, but loved it.
By the 90's, I even owned by own pepper mill but was still buying boring old black peppercorns from the supermarket. Cook books started talking about crushing pepper berries in a thing called a mortar and pestle so, I got me one of those. How delightful was the assault on my senses when I first used it to open up some pepper berries? A pivotal culinary moment for me.
And the quest was then on to find tastier and better pepper. I discovered "Herbies Herbs" (www.herbies.com.au) where you could buy all kinds of berries from all over the world.
Kampot pepper from Cambodia: considered to be the best in the world
Long Pepper from Indonesia: sweet and fragrant, it actually tastes amazing on strawberries and vanilla ice cream.
Sichuan pepper from China: a numbing, fizzy quality and almost sweet tasting
And good old white peppercorns, which apparently are the "heart" of the berry and are hotter and sharper to taste. Quite different from the stuff my Mum put into the shakers when we were kids.
The stuff was probably so old and stale, that's why it tasted like hot dirt. Ahh, a whole world of pepper out there. Who knew?
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