At a glance
A bowl for four, with drinks
EasyOne pan, no technique to learn first.
- Prep
- 2 min
- Cook
- 8 min
- Total
- 10 min
- Serves
- 4
The shortest recipe on this site, and one of the two or three I make most often. It is what to cook when people arrive and you want something on the table in the time it takes to open a bottle.
The pan has to be genuinely too hot
Blistering is not roasting. You want the thin skin of the pepper to char and lift away from the flesh underneath in patches, which happens fast and only at high temperature. A moderate pan cooks the peppers through evenly and gives you something soft and green and dull.
Cast iron holds the heat best, because three hundred grams of cold peppers will drop the temperature of a thin pan the moment they land.
Neutral oil, not olive
Olive oil’s smoke point is well below where this needs to happen, and it will fill the kitchen with acrid smoke and taste of it. Groundnut, rapeseed, or sunflower.
Salt while the oil is hot
Salt sticks to hot oil and slides off cool peppers. Tip them into the bowl and salt them immediately, tossing, and use more than you think is reasonable — these are eaten with fingers, one at a time, and each one needs to carry its own seasoning.
The lottery
Shishitos and padróns are mild cultivars that occasionally, unpredictably, produce a fruit with real capsaicin in it — usually reckoned at about one in ten, though it varies with the season and how stressed the plants were. There is no visual tell.
Serve them with a cold drink and let people find out.
Ingredients
Method
4 steps
Dry them
Wash the peppers well ahead and dry them completely. A wet pepper in a hot pan steams and never blisters, and it also spits at you.
Get the pan too hot
Heat a heavy or cast-iron pan over the highest flame you have until a drop of water skitters. Add the oil, then the peppers in one layer.
Toss twice, that is all
Let them sit for two minutes until the skins blister and blacken in patches, then toss and leave again. Six to eight minutes total, until they have collapsed slightly and are blistered all over.
Salt hot, lime at the table
Tip them into a bowl, salt them heavily while the oil is still hot enough to make it stick, and put the lime wedges alongside. Eat them with fingers by the stalk.
Cook's notes
- Roughly one in ten shishitos is properly hot and there is no way to tell which. That is the game; warn people, or do not.
- Extractor fan on, window open. This is a smoky eight minutes.
- Padróns behave identically and are more common in Europe. Anaheim and friar peppers are too thick-walled to work.
- Keeps
- It does not and should not. Eight minutes.
