In season: peperoncino

A view thoughts on eating products from the right season and some recipes to preserve peperoncino...

Lately when I visit markets in the area, or when I enter a supermarket, I find big bunches of various types of peperoncino everywhere. Finally! During the last months we always had to use dried chillies when cooking, while the fresh ones were not in season yet and therefore not available. Actually I guess this is a good thing about Italy. Even in the bigger supermarkets there still seem to be seasons, something we completely lost in the average Dutch supermarket. Whenever you feel like eating strawberries, lettuce or green beans, you can find them, while this is actually summer produce. When it is not possible to get the products from the Dutch soil, you will just find products imported from all different places in the world, causing an enormous ecological footprint. Or products come out of one of the many greenhouses we have at home, which has quite an ecological impact as well. In Italy this seems to be a bit different, although I would not be surprised if this is also changing slowly.

Of course it is a very difficult debate to decide what choices are best to make when it comes to buying food. We are maybe a bit spoiled these days, that it is possible to make seasons 'disappear' by importing products in the 'wrong' season from different countries. You could argue that this might also be a good thing when you look at the social factors, because by importing green beans from African countries in the Dutch winter you support the local economy in those countries. But if you would purely look at environmental factors, what would be the best choice to make? Eating locally, eating organic, either local or from far, eating food from greenhouses or from the direct soil? I find it all quite difficult and although I have a great interest in this topics for a few years already, it remains a complex field of study.

One way of comparing and analyzing the environmental impact of food choices and food consumption that could be helpful is by doing a Life Cycle Assessment. This is a tool that analysis all the inputs, impacts and outputs of a product, by looking at the raw materials, the manufacturing process, the distribution and retail, the consumer use and the disposal. In some cases some interesting results can come out of a Life Cycle Assessment. If you would compare growing green beans in the Netherlands with growing them in for example Kenya, it is very likely to find out that it is better to buy the beans from Kenya in wintertime, and the beans from the Netherlands in summertime. In our winter we could possibly grow the beans in a greenhouse, but this asks for an enormous amount of energy while the beans like it warm. In Kenya the climate is fine for the beans, so there is not a lot of energy needed for the production of the beans. The major negative impact is the transport from Kenya to the Netherlands, but compared to the energy needed for the greenhouses in the Netherlands this would still be a better choice.

Now that all sounds interesting of course, but when you make a comparison like this you compare the best choice of buying a summer vegetable in wintertime; of buying a product in the wrong season for the country or part of the world you live in. This means that this way we still ignore the fact that fruit and vegetables come with seasons. If you would look at the best ecological choice in green beans, you would only eat the beans when they are in season in your area and you would choose another product in another season. I was surprised to find out during a lecture I once attended about the environmental issues around food production, that choosing the beans from Kenya in the Dutch winter would be considered a good choice, while my common sense tells me that the best choice is still choosing as much as possible local food in the right season. Not only because the seasonal food from your local farmer has less foodmiles, but also because I believe that nature has intended it this way. Every season has its own specific products that are full of the right nutrients that you most need in that season. So in wintertime cabbages and brussels sprouts might just be a better choice in a Northern European country and the beans can best be left for the warm summer days.

In the right season there usually is an abundance of certain products, like delicious red fruit, nectarines, peaches and plums in the summer, as well as tomatoes, all sorts of different fresh beans and now at the end of the summer peperoncino. In Italy it is still quite common for the mamma's and the nonna's to buy big quantities of tomatoes when they are at there peak and when prices are low, and make liters of tomato sauces and preserves to store in the cupboard for colder days to come. This way products from a specific season can be stretched a lot further. Now I do not want to romanticise or idealise the Italian food culture (that is being done enough already), so I will also tell you that I am not sure if this tradition of preserving will keep up for many generations to come while these days it is so easy to choose one of the many, many bottles, jars and cans of tomatoes and tomato sauces in the supermarket, which was not the case in the younger days of the nonna's. But I do really like this concept of preserving, which has never really been part of my youth, and which I started to get an interest in during my many trips in Italy.

A good thing of making your own preserves, instead of choosing something from the supermarket, is that you can make it exactly the way you like it: add something extra, leave something out. I also like the idea that when I preserve something at home I am sure that no chemical rubish will be added to my food to make it last longer or taste better. While I now live in Italy, where it is not possible to find products all year round like in the Netherlands, I better make sure that I have some peperoncino ready to use in winter time, when I want to spice the cold days up a little bit. I remember from my stays in Sicily that there was always a jar of olio piccante open in the fridge, to add some spice to a simple plate of pasta al pomodoro for those who like it hot. I loved it, so that was the first thing that I decided to make. In the beautiful book 'Forgotten skills of cooking' of Darina Allen (who runs the world-renowned cookery school at Ballymaloe in Ireland), I found a recipe for a tomato chili jam, which sounds lovely, so that was another part of my peperoncino project. To use the rest of the peperoncini of the big bunch I got from the market I decided to dry them.

Olio piccante
Unfortunately I have to tell a little story here... I had a look in Darina Allen's book for olio piccante and she suggest to just add 1-6 chillies to a bottle of olive oil, leave them to infuse for a few days and you olio piccante is ready for use. Online I found suggestions to also add a few cloves of garlic, which I liked, so next to my 5 chillies I added two big cloves of garlic cut in half, and left it in a nice bottle of half a liter of olive oil to infuse. One morning I found the cork of the bottle somewhere in the middle of the room and an ugly spot of oil on the wall next to the bottle. Somehow pressure had been built up in the bottle and had pushed the cork out of the bottle. In the oil little bubbles were appearing and the pieces of peperoncino that used to sit still in the bottle all had started to move to the surface. Something went wrong here! The Drover did some quick research online and found out that a lot of people advice to use dried chillies and not fresh ones, because fermentation can occur. What a shame! I do still want to find out more about it, because I know that it must be possible to make olio piccante with fresh chillies. Once I have another recipe or the secret to avoid this problem I will let you know!

Tomato and Chili Jam
Adapted from Darina Allen, Forgotten Skills of Cooking
Makes 1 large or 2 small pots

Ingredients
500 g very ripe tomatoes
2-4 red chillies, depending on the strength (I used 3)
4 garlic cloves, peeled
2,5 cm piece of fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
30 ml fish sauce
310 g golden caster sugar
100 ml red wine vinegar

Peel the tomatoes and chop into small pieces. Make a puree of the chillies, garlic, ginger and fish sauce in a blender (my blender is to big for this, so depending on the size of your blender you might consider using a pestle and mortal). Put the puree, caster sugar and vinegar into a stainless-steel pan, add the tomatoes and bring to the boil slowly. Cook on a low fire for 30-40 minutes. Don't forget to occasionally stir to prevent sticking. When cooked pour the jam into warmed, sterilised glass jars. Leave to cool and store in a cool place. It will keep for months.

When I was making my jam I was a bit distracted (not very smart during cooking!) and I left it a bit longer on the stove. I also realised too late that to much of the tomato juices had ended up in the pan, instead of having mainly the pulp of the tomatoes. My jam in the end is more like a sauce, but oh well, as long as the flavour is nice I am happy for my first trial of jam making!

In case your creation does become a thicker substance that actually could be called jam (I am not having any doubts about the quality of this recipe, I think it was my own mistakes that caused a 'thin jam'), I would like to give you a little advice for checking when your jam is ready. Cool down a little plate in the fridge. Take a little bit of your warm jam and put it on the cold plate. If the jam sets immediately and it wrinkles a bit when you touch it it is ready to be poured into the warm, sterilised jars. To make sure that your jam gets stored airtight it is best to put the jar upside down for five minutes, after that you can just let them cool down normally. Good luck!

Dried chillies
This one is very simple to make. Take a needle and some strong, thin cotton thread and push the needle with the thread through the stems of the chillies. You can hang this up in the kitchen or if you live somewhere with a lot of sunshine, outside. The chillies will dry out and will keep their flavour for more than a year.