Course | Condiment |
---|---|
Main ingredients | Chili peppers, sugar and salt, pectin or vinegar |
Pepper jelly is a preserve made with peppers, sugar, and salt in a pectin or vinegar base. The product, which rose in popularity in the United States from the 1980s to mid-1990s, [1] can be described as a piquant mix of sweetness and heat, and is used for meats and as an ingredient in various food preparations. [2] It can be put in sandwiches, or served on cream cheese for a cracker spread [2] or used to make a pepper jelly cheesecake. [3] [4]
Pepper jelly's history starts in Lake Jackson, Texas. The first dates for commercial sale start around the late 1970s. The original recipes for pepper jelly were likely to be with jalapeño peppers. [5]
The more common preparation of pepper jelly is with jalapeños, bell peppers, pectin, sugar, vinegar, and oftentimes wine or liqueur. [6]
There have been taste tests to observe which pepper combination is most popular and desirable. The peppers looked at were Habanero, Cheiro do Norte, Biquinho, Malagueta, Cayenne, Paprika and Dedo de Moça. The study concluded that less pungent peppers (Biquinho, Paprika and Cheiro do Norte) were the most suitable for making jelly due to the reddish color, characteristic flavor and aroma of a pepper, sweet taste, and low pungency. [7]
The Scoville scale is a measurement of the pungency of chili peppers, as recorded in Scoville heat units (SHU), based on the concentration of capsaicinoids, among which capsaicin is the predominant component.
Seasoning is the process of supplementing food via herbs, spices, salts, and/or sugar, intended to enhance a particular flavour.
The bell pepper is the fruit of plants in the Grossum Group of the species Capsicum annuum. Cultivars of the plant produce fruits in different colors, including red, yellow, orange, green, white, chocolate, candy cane striped, and purple. Bell peppers are sometimes grouped with less pungent chili varieties as "sweet peppers". While they are fruits—botanically classified as berries—they are commonly used as a vegetable ingredient or side dish. Other varieties of the genus Capsicum are categorized as chili peppers when they are cultivated for their pungency, including some varieties of Capsicum annuum.
Chili peppers, from Nahuatl chīlli, are varieties of the berry-fruit of plants from the genus Capsicum, which are members of the nightshade family Solanaceae, cultivated for their pungency. Chili peppers are widely used in many cuisines as a spice to add "heat" to dishes. Capsaicin and related compounds known as capsaicinoids are the substances giving chili peppers their intensity when ingested or applied topically. While chili peppers are pungent or "spicy", there are other varieties of capsicum such as bell peppers which generally provide additional sweetness and flavor to a meal rather than “heat.”
Hungarian or Magyar cuisine is the cuisine characteristic of the nation of Hungary and its primary ethnic group, the Magyars. Traditional Hungarian dishes are primarily based on meats, seasonal vegetables, fruits, bread, and dairy products.
A chutney is a spread in the cuisines of the Indian subcontinent. Chutneys are made in a wide variety of forms, such as a tomato relish, a ground peanut garnish, yogurt or curd, cucumber, spicy coconut, spicy onion or mint dipping sauce.
The jalapeño is a medium-sized chili pepper pod type cultivar of the species Capsicum annuum. A mature jalapeño chile is 5–10 cm (2–4 in) long and hangs down with a round, firm, smooth flesh of 25–38 mm wide. It can have a range of pungency, with Scoville heat units of 4,000 to 8,500. Commonly picked and consumed while still green, it is occasionally allowed to fully ripen and turn red, orange, or yellow. It is wider and generally milder than the similar Serrano pepper.
A chipotle, or chilpotle, is a smoke-dried ripe jalapeño chili pepper used for seasoning. It is a chili used primarily in Mexican and Mexican-inspired cuisines, such as Tex-Mex and Southwestern United States dishes. It comes in different forms, such as chipotles en adobo.
Hot sauce is a type of condiment, seasoning, or salsa made from chili peppers and other ingredients. Many commercial varieties of mass-produced hot sauce exist.
Adobo or adobar is the immersion of cooked food in a stock composed variously of paprika, oregano, salt, garlic, and vinegar to preserve and enhance its flavor. The Portuguese variant is known as Carne de vinha d'alhos. The practice, native to Iberia, was widely adopted in Latin America, as well as Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia.
Capsicum annuum is a species of the plant genus Capsicum native to southern North America, the Caribbean, and northern South America. This species is the most common and extensively cultivated of the five domesticated capsicums. The species encompasses a wide variety of shapes and sizes of peppers, including sweet bell peppers and some chili pepper varieties such as jalapeños, New Mexico chile, and cayenne peppers. Cultivars descended from the wild American bird pepper are still found in warmer regions of the Americas. In the past, some woody forms of this species have been called C. frutescens, but the features that were used to distinguish those forms appear in many populations of C. annuum and are not consistently recognizable features in C. frutescens species.
Chili sauce and chili paste are condiments prepared with chili peppers.
A pickled pepper is a Capsicum pepper preserved by pickling, which usually involves submersion in a brine of vinegar and salted water with herbs and spices, often including peppercorns, coriander, dill, and bay leaf.
Fruit preserves are preparations of fruits whose main preserving agent is sugar and sometimes acid, often stored in glass jars and used as a condiment or spread.
Mustard is a condiment made from the seeds of a mustard plant.
Capsicum is a genus of flowering plants in the nightshade family Solanaceae, native to the Americas, cultivated worldwide for their chili pepper or bell pepper fruit.
Paprika is a spice made from dried and ground red peppers. It is traditionally made from Capsicum annuum varietals in the Longum Group, which also includes chili peppers, but the peppers used for paprika tend to be milder and have thinner flesh. In some languages, but not English, the word paprika also refers to the plant and the fruit from which the spice is made, as well as to peppers in the Grossum Group.