Fresh Pepper/Peppercorn 100g
Thai Name: Prik thai sot
When you sit in a high quality restaurant and the waiter offers you a sprinkling of black pepper, you don’t really cast a notion as how the pepper landed at your table. Fresh peppercorns are a flowering vine from the Piperaceae family. Grown for its fruit, which is then dried, and used for seasoning and spice.
The small fruit is usually only 5 millimetres in diameter, appears a dark red colour when fully ripe, which contains a single seed. The peppercorn is then ground to what we know and refer to as ‘pepper’. This is why the waiter is twisting the pepper-shaker when sprinkling it on your food, to grind it up.
The varieties of ground peppers derive from the variations of peppercorns grown in different regions, which all have contrasting tastes and aromas. The Thai peppercorn used in an array of dishes as a seasoning is black pepper or white pepper. Famous Thai dishes such as Stir Fried Pork Liver with Black Peppercorn (tub moo pad prik tai dum) are very popular and taste so great because of the black pepper seasoning.
Whereas in the western world, black pepper is bought ready packaged from a supermarket. Thai people will purchase the peppercorns directly from their local markets and ground the peppers themselves with a mortar and pestle into a fine powder we know as the finished product of pepper.
Many dishes that foreign visitors to Thailand consume will have a sprinkling of black pepper to provide that beautiful taste. Fried chicken with garlic and black pepper is one such favourite because of its tasty texture, as opposed to the plethora of spicy foods the Thais enjoy. Black pepper has become a fundamental ingredient and seasoning that will be found in some way, shape or form in every Thai kitchen.
Fresh produce of Thailand.
