Two Experiments

Last night I held two experiments in my kitchen.

One of my most favorite summertime foods is roasted bell peppers. At my parent's house every summer, my mom always has a bunch of them on hand - to eat with barbecue at dinner; to make sandwiches; for cold salads with tomato, onion, and mozzarella. You can eat them with anything, and I mean anything. They are pretty much the perfect summertime food, hot or cold, and they always make me think of summer.

The way my mom always roasts her peppers is by laying big slices of peppers under a very hot broiler in the oven. Then, when the skin is completely black and crispy, she peels the charred part off and is left with the slices. However, all my favorite food blogs tell me that my mom has been doing it wrong all her life. They say to char the skin off over an open flame -- preferably on a grill.

THE EXPERIMENT (#1): I decided to test these two methods and determine once and for all if my mom had been leading me astray all these years. Since I had no grill I used my oven range, which I figured would work just as well.

THE METHOD: I cut up one red pepper and laid it skin side up on a foil-covered cookie sheet, on the highest rack in my oven. I laid one yellow pepper over a high flame on my oven.

THE VERDICT: For the record, there was no discernible difference, taste-wise, between the two peppers. However, as soon as the broiler-pepper was ready, I was able to safely take it out of the oven, let it cool, peel the skin off, and roughly chop them for my salad. I threw out the skins and the tinfoil and there you had it. Cleanup's a breeze!

The yellow pepper took longer, since I had to constantly rotate it, managing to burn my hand in the process. I also had some difficulties getting it off the flame - once it was nicely roasted, the yellow pepper was a little less manageable than it was in its raw form. I also had more trouble peeling it - it was unwieldy and I would up running it under running water to get the charred bits off. Plus, I couldn't easily chop it since the seeds were still inside - I had to rip into it with my hands, barbarian-like, to get the pepper cleaned and suitable for eating.

THE WINNER: Mom, FTW!

EXPERIMENT #2: I could also call this "lessons learned." Basically, I always read that if you want to remove some heat from your peppers, you should remove the seeds and membranes from inside. Being a person who loves spicy food, I figured that I would ignore this critical step...and promptly dumped a whole serrano pepper into the cantaloupe salsa I was making. (Recipe can be found here, courtesy of Smitten Kitchen.)

THE RESULT: FIRE! They're not kidding about the 'heat' - I cried and wanted my mommy. (Not that I didn't continue to eat it.)

Happy kitchen adventures, friends!
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