Pimientos de Padrón
Description
Pimientos de Padrón are small green peppers picked when they are young, roughly the size of your thumb. They’re fried in olive oil, salted, and served at many tapas bars in Spain. Besides being salty and sweet, most people eat Pimientos de Padrón for the enyjoyment of eating them uniquely eating them is considered a form of culinary Russian roulette. Why? because of the random distibution of heat in the peppers you never know which one is going to be hot. You eat padron by just picking them up by the stalk and bite, even if you don't get a hot one you are still rewarded by the multi layer taste of aspargus, sweet peppers, tomatoe,slightly bittersweet undertones
Cooking Pimientos de Padrón
- 20 or so wholePimientos de Padron
- Add Olive Oil to cover the base of the pan and heat
- Add the peppers
- Cook until blistered and brown, but don't overcook
- Add a spinkling of Sea Salt
- Serve on a plate, pick up by the stem and bite...!!
Hot or Not
After growing Pimientos de Padrón for a few years now and eating a large number myself, knowing which are hot and those that are not is still a puzzle. This season there have not being so many hot ones, I think due to the lack of really hot days. Now into late august they do appear to me hotting up, maybe due to a warmer period of weather. Our plants get watered only when really necessary, this year we have only watered our crop tunnel three times since May
History
Pimientos de Padrón are one of the oldest non-hybrid peppers. As the story goes, Franciscan monks brought them to Spain from Mexico in the 18th century. They gained a name for themselves in the town of Padrón in the northwestern province of Galicia. To this day, a festival is held every August in honor of these little peppers in the nearby village of Herbon
