Kitchen Garden Forum

I've grown a different sweet pepper this year and was disappointed with the thick skin. It's a faff charring them to remove it so I used a nice sharp potato peeler and took it off as thinly as I could. I cooked them in the George Foreman grill and they were lovely and tender and sweet and took far less time than the conventional way.

I've always found that the skin on the Californian bell type peppers is very thick and it also takes longer to cook. These varieties are fine and sturdy enough to stay intact if you wish to do a dish like stuffed peppers, but these days I much prefer the long Italian type pointy varieties. They're very tender, thin skinned and delicious whether eaten chopped raw or cooked. Horses for courses I guess!.

Plum, which variety were you growing ?

The tough one is Piquillo a medium sized pointed one. I must say it isn't nearly as nice as the ones I usually grow from seeds I saved from an Italian long pointy tender one from the shop. The Piquillo does have a nice fruity taste and is good without it's skin.

The other one I've tried this year is Rocotillo and I'm afraid it is much too hot for me so it's back to my usual ones next year, Alberto Rocoto a thick fleshed one with a bit of heat, Sheepnose a small fruity round stuffing one with mildheat and the long pointed sweet Italian one. So much for being adventurous.

I think there's a strange crossover point between chillies and peppers where you end up in No Mans Land in terms of flavour/heat and I always get confused when I see seeds marketed as Chilli Peppers. I tend to regard them as separate entities, often used for different purposes and to my mind, to have a fiery pepper would be unpalatable.

However as Plumpudding comments, unless you experiment with different varieties, you don't get to discover these mysterious differences and much of the point of gardening and trying new things is to learn what suits you best.