Ingredient: Thai Long Peppers

One of the reasons I decided to start this blog was because people were asking about my experiments with flavors and molecular gastronomy stuff. Another was that I've noticed myself spending more and more time chasing down ingredients not found in normal grocery stores.

Sometimes (often, even) this involves a trip to Chinatown or Little India in Toronto. More on these another time. In this case, there was a bit more adventure.

I had never heard of Thai Long Peppers until dinner at Alinea, where we had a thai long pepper cream along with hibiscus gel and bubble gum tapioca pearls served in a sort of giant glass straw. I was intrigued and did some searching to learn more about them.

I had at first assumed they were a chili sort of pepper, but it turns out they're a spice -- more like a peppercorn but, well, long. They were apparently quite popular in the Roman Empire, before black peppercorns became more common. Now they're used mostly in Southeast Asia.

Since one can get just about anything in Toronto, I assumed they'd be in one of the Asian or South Asian markets. Not so much, at least as far as I could tell. Many of the staff in these places don't speak English, and labels are often nonexistent or non-English. But I searched quite a bit and couldn't turn up anything.

I kept them in the back of my mind, though, until a trip to Singapore for a conference and to see my sister (who lives there) last summer. She suggested we look for long peppers at the Thai supermarket (which I'd like to link to, but they don't seem to have a web site) in Singapore. We looked around, again not totally sure what to look for. And sure enough, there was this bag staring back at me from a shelf full of spices. I immediately bought them.

The flavor is interesting. They're quite spicy like pepper, but also have an anise-y almost smoky quality to them. The first thing I did with them was to make ice cream, grinding them up and substituting them into a black pepper ice cream recipe from David Lebovitz's book. It was clear they paired well with sugar and fat, which highlighted the flavors and cut the heat a bit. I also tried them in a cupcake with chocolate icing, and infused into vodka (which was seriously spicy, but better when combined with a vanilla/sugar syrup).

And that brings us to this week's dessert: Lime and Thai Long Pepper shortbread. Simple shortbread plus 1 TB or so lime zest and 1.5 tsp or so ground long pepper. Plus they're coated with a long pepper/sugar mixture. The lime plays fairly nicely with the long pepper, which gives it a bit of bite and peppery-ness. We'll see how they go over with colleagues tomorrow.

Apologies for this rather forlorn looking photo. I was in a bit of a rush.