Peppers and berries

Check out our range of peppers to season your cooking with flavour. We have provided you with information and advice on choosing peppers for your cooking! Pepper is indisputably the most frequently used spice in France. Although today it is a spice used daily, it remains a precious and rare product that several centuries ago was used as bartering currency. There are several types of pepper, whether due to different botanical varieties or different treatments of the same raw material.

Each one has its own specific features and uses in cooking. Do not confuse what are often called ‘true’ peppers that belong to the piper variety and ‘false’ peppers that are botanically from a different plant. A member of the piper family is the famous piper nigrum, which is always found paired with salt on European tables. Black, white and green peppers are in fact the same fruit which is picked at different stages of maturity.

In this category there are also long pepper and cubeb or “tailed” pepper. In the false pepper family, there are Sichuan pepper and pink berries, not to be confused with red pepper. Did you know that grey pepper is simply a trade name? In fact, black peppercorns have a black outer layer (the pericarp) enclosing the compounds that give it its spicy flavour and a white centre enclosing the aromatic compounds. When one grinds pepper, it therefore appears in different shades of grey.

The greyer a pepper is, the more subtlety it will have in these aromas. Be careful, you can find very poor quality grey pepper in the shops, which is made from lower quality pepper mixes. Pepper that is too black can also be a little suspect because it has a large quantity of pericarp and therefore probably much less aroma.