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Thursday, October 28, 2010

Roasted Red Pepper, a How To



I did this once before and was grossed out by the charred bits and the rinsed the roasted pepper to get the bits off. Don't do that. You'll essentially wash away the "roast" flavor and yield a pepper with a horrifying texture.

Roast a Red Bell Pepper

Wash and dry a red bell pepper. Turn a burner of a gas range on. Place the bell pepper directly onto the burner.


Rotate the pepper with tongs so that each side is blackened. Place the blackened pepper in a large bowl and cover it with plastic wrap. Let stand about 15 minutes to soften the skin. Condensation will accumulate.


Place the pepper on a cutting board. With a paring knife, cut the top off the pepper and carefully excise the seeds with the top.


Place the pepper on it's side, and scrape the black skin off with a chefs knife. Slice the pepper along one side and flatten it on the board and continue scraping. Once the majority of blackened bits are removed, dice or chop the pepper.


I've read that roasting the pepper in the oven yields better results.  I'll have to look into that one day.

Update, 101611:
I just roasted a red pepper and this time I really made sure all of it was blackened, where last time there were still some parts that were clearly red -- check out the photo above, the one with the pepper in the bowl. After letting the completely black pepper sweat in a covered bowl, the black skin slipped right off, no knife-scraping required!


2 comments:

Laura said...

Never heard of doing it this way before, but the oven method always seemed way too difficult. I may give this a try!

The Cook said...

Hmm, that's odd. I thought the oven method would essentially be the same except more time consuming as you'd have to wait for the oven to warm. I'll definitely try it now just to satisfy my curiosity.