Without Reservations

Snow peppers

Cold climates present their trials, of course — you have not really lived until you've felt the wind come sweepin' down the plain when it's 20 below zero — but they also offer certain compensations, sometimes quite poignant ones. My brother and his wife live on six acres of not-quite-<\d>suburban land 20 miles west of Minneapolis, and while the growing season is short, they make the most of their warm days.

I was particularly impressed to be given, as a Christmas present of sorts, a bundle of dried chili peppers, as tiny and fiercely red as holly berries, most of them still attached to the (equally dry) plants on which they'd been grown over the summer in the big vegetable patch behind the house. The garden was a snowy waste the week after Christmas, but in mid-September it had been heavy with pumpkins, butternut squash, rioting tomatoes, clumps of basil, and plenty of peppers both sweet and hot.

"Careful with those!" my brother warned me. "They're really hot."

Yes? They weren't Scotch bonnets or those needlelike, incendiary Thai peppers, so I assumed I would be able to handle them somehow, though I use chilis less than I used to: Cast-iron stomachs can become rusty and brittle with time. But when I got them home, I fretted about what to do with them. They couldn't, after all, be set out like a bowl of almonds, for idle grazing.

Piri piri is both a kind of pepper and a condiment, ubiquitous inPortuguese cuisine, made from that pepper. At the Spanish Table, in Berkeley, you can find both, in jars; the peppers are pickled, and the sauce is a reddish, salsalike mush. But there is another kind of piri piri sauce, a blend of olive oil and brandy infused with dried piri piri pepper. My brother's peppers were a little too small and orotund to be piri piris, but they were hot and crushable. I smashed four tablespoonsful in a mortar and pestle and simmered the flakes for 20 minutes with 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil and 1/3 cup of brandy. After it cooled, I poured it into a jar, covered, and let stand a week or so, then strained out the solids and ended up with a fragrant, orange-ish oil.

Recipe: Sauté a pound of large, peeled prawns in a bit of butter. Add some chopped garlic, a scatter of salt, and a splash of piri piri oil, and cook for a few more minutes, turning occasionally. Squeeze in some lemon juice, add some chopped cilantro, and serve ... hot!

Paul Reidinger

paulr@sfbg.com