This is a cracking little recipe to have in your repertoire; it can be a sauce, a salsa, a dressing or a dip. It works as well with fish as it does with chicken, lamb or cheese. Easily adaptable it could be South American as much as it could be Creole or Provençal. Add oomph with chilli, infuse it with herbs… the world is your oyster Baby.
It’s not a showy number; with only a handful of ingredients there are no bells or whistles, and likewise there’s nowhere to hide. It’s all about the pepper.
Roasting red peppers really accentuates their positives; their slippery flesh smoked by their own skin and their natural sweetness intensified, but to do this they must be good and ripe in the first place, and thoroughly red. Sure, you can take a blow torch to a red pepper to blister the skin or hold it over a flame, but that ain’t roasting them, is it!
A barbecue would be the ideal opportunity to give this a whirl, nothing fancy, a couple of lamb chops and a corn on the cob would be a good place to start, I’m generally free on Mondays… Failing that I serve it at the bistro with a big fat piece of fish, which sits on top of a chickpea mash with some griddled aubergine.
Ingredients
(makes enough for 4 – 6 main course dollops)
3 x large red peppers
2 x teaspoons dark muscovado sugar
1x tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 x tablespoon sherry vinegar (or red wine vinegar)
50 ml olive oil (or a 50/50 combination of extra virgin and sunflower)
3 x cloves garlic, unpeeled.
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
Preheat the oven to 200⁰C.
Halve the peppers vertically through the stalk. Pull out the green stalk and remove all seeds, pith and associated clutter.
Massage a little olive oil onto the skin side of each pepper and place cut face down on a baking tray along with the whole garlic cloves.
Season with salt and pepper then whack them in the oven, top shelf, for 20 mins. You may then need to turn the tray around to colour evenly, they may need another 10 minutes; we want the skins to be wrinkled and scorching.
As soon as you take the peppers out of the oven, have a freezer bag at the ready to scrape the peppers into, tying a knot in the bag to create a steam trap. A Pyrex bowl with a bit of cling film would work equally well. Put the garlic to one side for now.
Leave the peppers until they are cool enough to handle, then remove them from the bag, but don’t throw away the accumulated juices. Peel off the skins and finely chop the flesh.
Add the mustard to a bowl, peel the roast garlic cloves and add them too, mashing them together. Add the vinegar and a generous pinch of salt. Now add the oil in a steady trickle whisking continuously to form a thick vinaigrette.
Add to this the sugar and the paprika, followed by the red peppers and accumulated juices and taste for seasoning.
If refrigerating for future use, bring it to room temperature before using as the oils will solidify. This will keep in the fridge for up to five days.
See you Monday.