Introducing the not-so-humble Peppadew

One of the first delights I discovered when I first visited South Africa in the early '90s was the peppadew. A small, round pepper about the size of a large cherry tomato, it's sweet and a little bit spicy at the same time and utterly delicious. Fresh, they're crunchy as you would expect them to be, and sold in jars in grocery stores, they're - well, a bit mushier, like peppers in a jar. Because they're mass-produced peppers in a jar.

But not peppadews by Shelley. My partner's cousin's partner (following that?) tried her hand at pickling the peppadews she swears grow like weeds on the KwaZulu Natal South Coast.

Photo credit: me
Picking and pickling credit: Shelley

As you can see, the jar is half full. Those peppadews are going into everything I can think of and they are sunshine distilled into crunchy little cells of yum.

A note about the South Coast, particularly Port Edward which is where these delicious peppadews came to life: the climate there is mild and subtropical, the area is characterised by rolling hills covered in sugar cane waving incessantly in the breeze, people sell avocados in the emergency lane of the highway (yeah, haven't figured that one out yet - is an avocado really an impulse purchase?), and the place is really sleepy except during the December holidays and the sardine run in May or so. Port Edward is located on the southern border of KwaZulu Natal on the coast, and is the local metropolis. And that, fellow Steemians, is a question of scale.

But back to the peppadew, because how could I show this to you and not give you some ideas of how to eat it? You could -

• toss them chopped in half into any kind of salad (they go well with feta cheese)
• keep a bowl of these pickled peppadews with some goat cheese for dipping for consumption while sharing tales of the day over a frosty glass of beer or chilled white wine
• chop a few up and mix with some freshly cooked corn sliced off the cob and use as a salsa (I also add chopped black olives to this blend of flavours and textures to bring in a contrasting salty element)
• add them to a tomato sauce for texture and flavour.

Those are just a few ideas to get you going. Once you taste them, you'll want to add them to all kinds of dishes.

And I do hope this entices you to visit the South Coast and sample the fresh peppadews there. I promise to post more on the South Coast - there's a phenomenal little (really little) desert I'll be telling you about shortly. But that's for another post on another day. Today we celebrate the pugnacious peppadew. Salut!