PEPPER
A chefs necessity along with salt, pepper is always used in every dish created. Seasoning is one of the first things we are taught to do and it starts from the beginning of the dish right through to the end. Pepper is found all over the world and on almost everyone’s table and yet most people no very little about it besides the fact that it makes food taste good, but pepper is complex and is owed its story from seed to what is bought in shops.
Pepper is the fruit from a flowering vine and once picked is dried and sometime crushed. Black pepper is the worlds most traded spice. Black peppercorns are considered spicier than white.
BLACK – Black pepper is produced from the still-green unripe drupes of the pepper plant. The drupes are cooked briefly in hot water, both to clean them and to prepare them for drying. The heat ruptures the cell walls in the pepper, speeding the work of browning enzymes during drying. The drupes are dried in the sun or by machine for several days, during which the pepper around the seed shrinks and darkens into a thin, wrinkled black layer. Once dried, the spice is called a black peppercorn.WHITE - White pepper consists of the seed of the pepper plant alone, with the darker colored skin of the pepper fruit removed. White pepper is sometimes used in dishes that have light sauces or béchamel based sauces and in certain vegetables like mashed potatoes, where ground black pepper would be visibly, they have differing flavors due to the presence of certain compounds in the outer fruit layer of the drupe that are not found in the seed, so its better to use a white pepper as a subtle seasoning and black pepper as more the visible seasoning.
GREEN - Green pepper, like black, is made from the unripe drupes. Dried green peppercorns are treated in a way that retains the green color, such as treating it with sulfur dioxide or freeze-drying which basically means to lock in all the freshness and keep it in a state that it was in when picked. Pickled peppercorns, also green, are unripe drupes preserved in a brine or vinegar.
RED/PINK - Pink and red peppercorns are made and preserved the same way as green, so they are picked at the correct time then either pickled, freeze dried.
RECIPE:
One of my favorite desserts to do with pink peppercorns is a Pink peppercorn and vanilla bean panacotta.
The picture and some of the information is from wikipedia
