It's Pepper Time!

This title reminds me of a 1990 song, “Can't Touch This” by MC Hammer because if you don’t cut peppers properly, then you will be dancing around like the people in the video. All peppers are structured equally, but when it comes to taste, there is a grand canyon of difference between sweet peppers and extremely hot ones. Today’s tip is discussing a technique on how to cut a pepper to avoid dancing around blindly. Let’s begin by understanding the anatomy of a pepper. Generally, they are round semi-hollow vegetables with stems and seed pods inside. Now, like the onion, peppers have capsaicin in the white ribs and seeds inside the hollow cavity. Similar to the onion, if you follow this technique as to not disturb those parts more than needed it will prevent any disaster that might cause you to dance and do a few other things.

Start by setting up your cutting board with a towel underneath

Cutting board, knife and pepper

Slice the stem end (top) off of the pepper. Don’t throw away this end because we will come back to use in a later step. Note: if these are extremely hot peppers like ghost peppers, then put on some food safe latex gloves for this whole process. If you need to scratch your nose or any other part of the body while wearing the gloves, please remove them and then use new gloves.

Cutting the top off the pepper

Gently with your knife, hold the pepper in one hand with the sliced top facing upward toward the knife, cut around the inside edge of the pepper to loosen the ribs and seeds of the pepper.

Gently using the knife, cut the rib away from the outer skin

Lay your knife down on the cutting board, and with your fore finger on your knife hand, stick it into the pepper and clean out the ribs and seeds over a garbage bowl or sink. You likely will not be able to remove all of the ribbing, but that is fine, we will handle that with a future step.

Use your fingers to pull out the inside of the pepper and discard everything that is removed

Take the knife, and cut the bottom end off of the pepper and save it for a later step.

Cut the bottom of the pepper off

Place the pepper vertically on the cutting board and slice it in half.

Vertically, slice the pepper in half

Take one half of the pepper and skim the knife along the inside of the pepper flesh. Trim all of the white ribbing away. Now repeat on the other half of the pepper.

Gently slice down the inside of the pepper to remove any remaining white flesh (ribs)

To Slice: take one half of the pepper, skin side down and slice into strips. Repeat with the other half. Take the top piece and poke out the stem and cut into slices of the same width. Take the bottom of the pepper and cut into slices of the same width.

Skin side down, make cuts across the pepper from top to bottom

To Dice: after slicing the pepper, take a portion of the slices, place on the cutting board where they roughly start and stop at the same point. With the knife perpendicular to the slices, chop to the desired width. You should end up with little cubes of pepper.

Line up a small amount of the slices and cut across the slices to form little cubes

To Store: use either a plastic bag or container and store them in the refrigerator for up to a week and in the freezer for several months.

Now you don’t have to wear the baggy pants and cut your hair a special way to dance in the kitchen, really! You just need to cut a pepper without any fear of tears.

It’s pepper time!