Something About Pepper

According to I grew up with it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pepper

Something about pepper that I am going to tell today is piper nigrum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pepper). If you see me playing piano, you won’t believe that I knew how to cultivate pepper vines from its cutting, how to harvest, how to process for sales and how to apply it to food.

    I usually prefer to stock up organically grown peppercorns harvested from my parents or my own Sarawak home.

    Sarawak pepper is listed as one of the world best peppers, basically, they are all sun-dried peppercorn. Black peppercorn is the peppercorn harvested from the tree when they were mature enough, in such a way the stem might carry some red berries and some green berries. The berries would be separated from its stem, usually laid on the straw mat to dry under the hot and intense equatorial sun.

    White peppercorn would cost more due to it required more labored time and effort. The berries would be soaked in a running stream for days to get rid of its outer skin, the remaining seed with whitish-brown color would be dry under the sun.  Due to the skin of white peppercorn was eliminated during the process, it is spicier than black pepper and is definitely not as mellow as black pepper. You can use more black pepper on a steak but a little less if you use white pepper. White pepper’s pepper flavor would be more intense due to it is pure “pepper”

    If you plant and eat pepper like me since young, before I wanted to produce ground pepper, I would stir-fry my peppercorn on the wok until its essential oil released and turned off the heat immediately, if you overcooked it, once the oil has dried up, your ground pepper would not smell as good.

    Many people prefer to use green pepper to cook meat and prepare a sauce. It is nice, but if you have dehydrated green peppercorn, I would advise you to stir-fry it over the frying pan to release it essence oil before preparing your sauce.

    If you prepare your stock with black peppercorn, if you don’t cook it a long time, you are wasting your peppercorn, you would be getting its flavor from skin and endocarp instead if you don’t give them a light smash with your knife.

    In Sarawak, a most popular dish for Chinese to use black peppercorns (Only come to these days, Sarawakiens begin to use fresh green peppercorn for this dish) to prepare their dish is pig stomach.

   This is my recipe:

Ingredients:

One cleaned pig stomach, cut into bite size pieces (usually they would wash it with vinegar and starch), 

1 medium size daikon Japanese cut,

50g smashed ginger,

2 tbsp black peppercorns/fresh green peppercorns give a light smash for a portion of it

200g pork sparerib/pork belly,

Sesame oil,

100ml rice wine.

200ml Pork stock/water

TT Salt, wine, and vinegar

Method:

1.      Stir-fry ginger and peppercorns with sesame oil

2.      Add pork meat and stomach

3.      Deglaze with wine

4.      Add daikon, continue to stir-fry

5.      Add stock or water

6.      Boil then transfer to a slow cooker

7.      Cook until tender

8.      Season with salt, wine, and vinegar

9.      Served with rice

    Once I prepared green pepper sauce for individual beef Wellington when I studied in NZ L4 cookery, these were the ingredients I used. Dehydrated green peppercorn (Panfry), stock, cashew nuts (toasted), coriander, parsley, butter (monte), seasoned with sugar, vinegar, and salt.