I was at the Grand Lake Farmers Market this morning in Oakland, and one of the farmers' stand had a table filled with these peppers. One side of the table were padron peppers and the other side were shishito peppers.
I fell in love with both varieties last year. They're best when just simply blistered in a pan with some oil and then just eaten warm. The Spanish Padron peppers are famous for being mildly sweet and then you get hit by a f-bomb when you bite into one that's super spicy.
Shishito peppers are the Japanese cousins of the Padron peppers, and I find them fairly similar in taste, except I feel their skins are a bit more waxy. I love them both so I would buy one basket of each one, mix them up in the pan as I blister them and just munch away.
Now, can you tell which ones are the Padron and which ones are the Shishito? Top or bottom? Find the answer in the comments section.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Peppers at the Farmers Market
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3 comments:
If you guessed that the top photo is Shishito and the bottom is Padron, then you're a pepper, too! You got it right. Now go try some. :)
I LOVE shishito peppers! I've used them on pizza, in quesadillas, scrambled eggs, with pasta, in jambalaya, and a million other ways.
Padrons scare me - it's like playing pepper roulette!
I love these peppers, as well, but I have refused to buy them at the market for the past two summers, because I think Happy Boy's prices for them are a total rip-off. For whatever reason, they seem to be the only folks at both Grand Lake and Temescal who carry these peppers, so I guess they can charge what they want. But I just can't see paying $4 for a basket of peppers that weighs maybe a third of a pound. $12 a pound is more than I pay for grass-fed beef at Berkeley Bowl! And I'm annoyed, too, by the fact that two years ago they were $4 a lb, tops, and then they became popular and the price tripled!
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