CHEFS TURN UP THE HEAT WITH LESSER-KNOWN CHILES
Ají dulce, ají amarillo, pasilla and other varieties appear across menus
By Fern Glazer
Peppers from North End Grill’s rooftop.
Photo: Melissa Hom
Though heat-inducing jalapeño, habanero, chipotle and Serrano peppers are fast becoming menu mainstays, some chefs are looking to turn up the flavor with less familiar varieties of chile peppers and chile oils.
According to officials at Technomic Inc., a number of lesser-known varieties of peppers are already emerging on menus and the Chicago-based market research firm predicts a trend in the making.
Eric Korsh, executive chef of North End Grill in New York City, is a big fan of ají dulce peppers, a sweet perennial pepper that grows mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean.
After finding the pepper difficult to source in the United States, Korsh began growing his own on North End’s rooftop. Korsh harvests and then pickles the ají, which preserves the pepper’s natural floral undertones and moderate smoky heat. He uses them on his Spanish mackerel crudo, along with cucumber, grapefruit, Serrano peppers and radish.
“Most peppers have one or two dimensions in terms of their flavor profile. You eat a jalapeño and you get the flavor of a jalapeño, combined with that particular type of heat, or you eat a red bell pepper and you get that flavor, but there isn’t much else going on,” Korsh said. “But the ají dulce pepper is unique because there are two or three things happening in the flavor profile that exist naturally in the chile.”
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FLAVOR PROFILE
