salted shishito peppers

This weekend while walking through the Farmer's Market at the Ferry Building, we picked up various different vegetables (chard, basil, sweet peppers) and meats (charcuterie from Fatted Calf, prosciutto and pancetta) along with the arugula and leeks seedlings we bought and promptly brought home to plant. One of the veggies we picked up was a basket of shishito peppers. We cooked these up as an appetizer to hold us over before a small plates style dinner of sweet peppers stuffed with cream cheese, sauteed oyster mushrooms, green onions and garlic and prosciutto with basil and carrot wraps.

The shishito peppers were easy to make and super tasty as the peppers are sweet and rarely have any heat. To make them, I took a pan and heated some oil over high heat and once it was hot enough threw the peppers in.


You cook them for only a couple of minutes until they start to blacken in spots. Pull them off the heat into a paper towel lined bowl and sprinkle with a coarse salt. Serve on a plate.

Norma had the good idea, that instead of sprinkling salt on them, to stuff them, so we tried it out on a few of the peppers. We cut a small slit in them and put some salt inside the peppers and then cooked it the same way. It resulted in the sweet pepper absorbing the salt a tad bit more than having the salt sprinkled on did, allowing for the taste of the pepper to shine through a bit more than it does the traditional way. Either way was good though in case you don't want to take the time to stuff each pepper with salt.

After overcooking the first batch by leaving them on a low heat for too long, I tried it again over high heat and the result was much better as the peppers cooked yet retained their crunchiness instead of becoming a soggy mess.

sadly, that's the only pic I took this time through.