Making use of Bishop’s Crown peppers and getting a spicy surprise!
Sometimes, first impressions can deceive you. Here is such a story for your reading pleasure.
My aunt gave my family an interesting plant I had never seen before, a Bishop’s crown pepper, a truly fun and unique looking pepper, of a rather mild heat with a pleasant fruity flavor, I ranked them as basically mini bell peppers with extremely thin flesh in terms of usefulness, so perhaps for stuffing. I did read some accounts of how they were quite hot and I dismissed them immediately from my first hand knowledge.
Not wanting to stuff several little peppers I decided to take a page out of Michael Ruhlman’s book, as I tend to, and make a pickled pepper, and take advantage of it to use up some of the massive amount of carrots I had laying around the house due to an ill advised grocery shopping decision.
To make a long story short, after going through the whole process of prepping, brining and pickling the pepper carrot mixture and giving a piece an experimental bite to see how much the mildness had improved, my eyes immediately started watering and I started looking for some milk.
I’m not going to say they were magically heated up by the salt, they were probably hot to begin with, but it was quite a shock.
But while the results turned out differently than expected, they were not unwelcome in the slightest. The heat infused carrots were a special revelation, and diced up and used in a mirepoix, they add a delicious kick to soups.
For those of you who probably don’t have a Bishop’s Crown Pepper plant available, I bet red jalapenos would work in a pinch. If using legitimately hot peppers like Serranos, you might have to cut back on the amount of peppers, or add some filler peppers like poblanos or bell peppers. Anyway, I’ll try those out later.
In the meantime, here’s how to make it.
The proper combination of vegetables for picking is more art than science honestly, the science comes with the brine. In this case I used nearly two carrots, 15 bishop’s crown peppers, a medium red onion and a head of garlic.
