peppers – Gastronomy Domine

21st July 2011

Roast vegetable and halloumi tart

I’ve been busy working on some new recipes while having a month off from blogging. This is a really good-looking tart, great for parties. I love working with filo pastry; it’s very forgiving (any little tears can easily be ignored as you layer new sheets on), and the crisp finish is second to none, fantastic against the softened vegetables and the bite of the halloumi.

For one 20cm tart, you’ll need:

50g pancetta
1 large white onion
1 large sweet potato
4 pointed peppers
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
100g halloumi
10 sheets filo pastry
25g melted butter
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 200ºC (390ºF). Toss the pancetta, the onion, diced finely, and the peeled, cubed potato in the olive oil with a large pinch of salt and some pepper. Roast for 45 minutes, stirring once halfway through the cooking time. The sweet potatoes should be turning golden-brown, and the onions should be sweet and golden. Turn the oven down to 190ºC (370ºF).

While the sweet potato mixture is roasting, cut the peppers in half and grill them, skin side up, until the skins turn black and start to blister. Seal the hot, blistered peppers in a plastic freezer bag. The steam they release will help to loosen the skins and make them easy to slip off with your fingers.

Line a loose-bottomed 20cm tart dish with filo pastry. Lay a sheet halfway across the dish and fold over any that dangles over the edge. Lay another sheet across the other half of the dish, brush them both with butter, and rotate the dish 45 degrees. Repeat the process until you have used up all ten sheets. Prick the base of the pastry a few times with a fork, and line with a circle of greaseproof paper. Fill the tart case with baking beans and bake blind for ten minutes. Remove the beans and paper.

Chop the halloumi into pieces the same size as the chunks of sweet potato, and chop the skinned peppers. Toss the halloumi, peppers and thyme with the sweet potato mixture. Spoon the filling into the tart case. Bake for another 30-40 minutes until golden. Leave to rest for 10 minutes before popping the tart out of the case and serving.

15th September 2010

Gazpacho

I’m looking out of the window as I type this, and I’ve come to the sad conclusion that it’s definitely not summer any more. This will be this 2010’s final recipe for the contents of your greenhouse. This year hasn’t been fantastic for tomatoes, but the cucumbers have been glorious (full disclosure here – I didn’t grow any myself, but my parents have enough to club a small army to death with), and peppers are at their best now. It goes without saying that this recipe is totally dependent on the quality of your ingredients.

Most think of gazpacho as a cold tomato soup. Tomatoes do make up the dominant ingredient by weight, but a good gazpacho should take much of its flavour from the cucumber (surprisingly aromatic) and peppers. Get the finest, ripest vegetables you can find, and if at all possible, try to get your hands on one of those lovely, spurred, English cucumbers – they’ve a lot more flavour to them than one of the smooth-skinned supermarket variety. Use your best olive oil, and enjoy the last of the sunshine. If you’re preparing this as part of a special meal, you can jazz it up something spectacular by shredding some fresh, sweet white crab meat, and putting a couple of tablespoons of it in the bottom of each bowl before you pour the soup over.

Finally, a word of warning. Your guests might have a baked-in dislike of chilled soups. Check before you serve this up. I remember the look of utter misery on my Dad’s face when we visited a friend’s house once and were presented with a choice of Vichyssoise and gazpacho to open a meal with. Dad, you’re a heathen, but for you I’d warm this through on the hob.

To serve four as a starter, you’ll need:

1kg ripe tomatoes, as fresh as possible
4 banana shallots
3 cloves garlic
2 red peppers
1 green pepper
1 large cucumber
2 slices stale white bread, soaked in water and squeezed
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
4 tablespoons olive oil
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
Salt and pepper

Peel the tomatoes by scoring them around the equator and dunking them in boiling water to loosen the skins. Cut them open and discard the seeds. Blacken the skin of the peppers under the grill, pop the steaming peppers in a plastic box with the lid on for a few minutes to loosen the skins, peel and seed. Peel the cucumber, chop the shallots into quarters and mince or otherwise squish the garlic.

Blitz the vegetables and bread to a smooth purée in batches with the other ingredients. Taste for seasoning; you may want to add a little more vinegar or paprika as well as salt. Chill thoroughly and serve cold, with a little more olive oil drizzled over.

31st August 2010

Stupendous tomato sauce

Stupendous because, really, there is no other word for this stuff. It’ll take you the best part of a day to make, although there’s not much real work involved, just a bit of stirring every half hour or so – if you’re going to be around the house all day, just carry a timer with you set to go “bing” every half hour to remind you to go and stir the sauce. You’ll use up two kilos of those tomatoes you’ve got ripening away in the greenhouse, and you’ll finish with a sauce that tastes like pure condensed summer. It freezes well – I have a few boxes of this sauce in the freezer to be hauled out in the middle of winter, when tomatoes are indistinguishable from potatoes.

The idea here is to drive as much of the moisture as possible out of sweet, summery peppers and tomatoes, encouraging their natural sugars to caramelise. The tomatoes you choose should be the very best you can find. This recipe is fantastic for gardeners with a glut of tomatoes, but you can make it with good tomatoes from the market too. Just make sure you use the sort of tomatoes that you’d be happy to snack on raw; the sort where you suddenly discover you don’t have any left because they were so good you accidentally ate them all without noticing.

This sauce is beyond fabulous on its own, dressing some pasta – if you can find Giovanni Rana fresh pasta at your local supermarket or deli, the basil and spinach fettuccine is a great match, with its intense basil aroma. For plain pasta, throw a few basil leaves and maybe some oregano over when you serve. I also love it as a sauce for chicken breasts that have been butterflied, beaten flat, breaded and fried crisp (you don’t need a recipe for those – just put the butterflied breasts between two pieces of cling film; wallop the hell out them with a rolling pin; then flour, egg and crumb them before frying for five minutes on each side); it’s great mixed with some grilled vegetables or as a sauce for grilled, oily fish too. You can use it as a dip, in sandwiches, as an enriching ingredient for other sauces, as a base for soups – versatile, delicious, wonderful stuff.

To make about 12 servings (you’ll be freezing these in individual portions, and with something that takes so long to cook it seems a waste to make any less) you’ll need:

6 bell peppers (orange, red or yellow)
2kg tomatoes
100g butter
150ml olive oil
2 large onions
1 head garlic
Salt and pepper

Blitz the bell peppers with the onions in the food processor. You’re aiming for a rough, wet puree. Put the resulting glop in your biggest saucepan (preferably something with a heavy base that will disperse the heat evenly – I have a giant le Creuset casserole which is perfect for this sort of thing) with the butter and cook over a medium flame without a lid, stirring occasionally, for about an hour. Eventually, the peppers will start darkening in colour, most of the liquid will have been cooked off, and the whole arrangement will have a jammy texture. It may take more than an hour to get to this stage, depending on the water content of your peppers and the diameter of your pan.

Puree the tomatoes with the peeled garlic. Add them to the jammy contents of the saucepan with the olive oil and stir well to make sure everything is combined. Now go and busy yourself doing whatever it is you do when you’re not cooking, being sure to return to the pan every half hour to stir it, scraping the bottom and moving the sauce around the pan. After a few hours, as the sauce thickens, start returning to the pan every 15 or 20 minutes if you feel it is in danger of sticking when left for half an hour.

Again, timing here varies on your tomatoes and your pan, but around six hours (maybe more) after you first put the tomatoes on the hob, the contents of the pan will have reduced by more than half. The sauce will be fabulously gloppy when stirred, and will be darkening and beginning to give up its oil. No tomato juice will rush to the surface when you press down on the sauce with a wooden spoon. Taste the sauce, which should look a bit like rusty sun-dried tomato paste, try not to jump too high for joy at the intense, umami flavour, and season.

I freeze this sauce in 250g bags – enough to serve two generously. Your yield should be about six bags, give or take. Unfrozen, the sauce will keep in the fridge for about a week.

8th April 2010

Piedmont peppers

This recipe is based loosely around an Elizabeth David one my Mum used to serve up regularly as a cold antipasto when my brother and I were tinies. We couldn’t get enough of it, and I know he has his own version of the recipe too.

These peppers must be served at room temperature, when they are, unaccountably, much sweeter and juicier than they are when warm. The original version calls for bell peppers, but I’ve found that pointed Romano or Piquillo peppers tend to contain more in the way of fruit sugars and taste far better. (It goes without saying that the peppers you choose should be ripe – red, orange and yellow ones are all find, but avoid the green peppers when you go shopping.) If you have guests whose stomachs are made sensitive by peppers, advise them to peel the indigestible skins off before they eat, which should prevent any upsets.

This is a recipe it’s worth trying out on anchovy-haters, several of whom I’ve brought round using these peppers – not necessarily to a whole-hearted embracing of the anchovy, but at least to a whole-hearted embracing of it in this particular dish. The final result isn’t a fishy one, rather a deeply savoury, umami dish, full of sweet and buttery juices (you’ll use a lot of butter here – it’s worth it) to dip some good crusty bread into. If you love the sweet, fruity bite of a roast pepper (god knows, I do), you’ll find this is one of the best ways to showcase that flavour.

To prepare six peppers as an antipasto (how many you’ll eat depends on how much else you prepare, but you’ll find these disappear quickly) you’ll need:

6 Romano or Piquillo peppers
12 anchovies
3 plump tomatoes
6 plump cloves garlic
100g butter
olive oil to drizzle
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Cut the peppers in half lengthwise, discard any seeds, and chop each half into half again across the short edge. Lay the peppers out in a large baking tray (use two if you have to), the skin side down.

Chop the tomatoes into quarters and put a piece in each little pepper boat. Cut each clove of garlic into four fat slices and put one in each pepper, along with half an anchovy fillet. Cut the butter into small pieces and scatter them all over the dish. Sprinkle everything with a generous amount of salt and pepper, drizzle a few tablespoons of olive oil over the whole dish and put everything, uncovered, in the oven for between 45 minutes and an hour until the edges of the peppers are browning. (The cooking time is imprecise here because a riper pepper will cook faster than a less ripe one – I find this recipe performs differently at different times of year and with different peppers, so you’ll have to use your judgement here.)

Remove the dish from the oven and leave it on the side, covered with a teatowel, until the peppers are at room temperature. Serve with plenty of the juices from the bottom of the dish drizzled over, and lots of crusty bread to soak them all up.

24th February 2010

Bury black pudding hash with peppers and apple vinaigrette

I’ve never really understood why some people get so squeamish about black pudding. I know, I know – it’s blood, back fat and barley – but surely that’s no more upsetting than the gubbins that goes into a standard sausage? Dr W encourages me to mention a chitterling and tripe-tastic andouillette he ate in Paris once, which, he claims, “tasted of bums”. Black pudding is infinitely nicer.

My suspicion is that people recalling cut lips imagine black puddings to taste bloody and metallic. These flavours are absent from a black pudding, which is actually deeply savoury, delicately spiced (especially if you get your mitts on a particularly good one, like these from Bury in Lancashire), and, cooked properly, has a wonderful texture: crisp, sticky and crumbling all at once.

The Bury black pudding is, for my tastes, the most reliable and delicious you’ll find in the UK, and many butchers and supermarkets all over the country carry them – you can also order them online from the makers. (At a supermarket, you’re more likely to find one on the deli counter than the butchery counter.) They’re seriously, seriously good; porky, plump and gorgeously spiced. The recipe is a secret, but apparently there’s pennyroyal, fennel and all kinds of other good stuff in there. Do try to go out of your way to find a couple for this recipe.

To serve four, you’ll need:

2-3 Bury black puddings
4 large potatoes (I used Kestrel)
3 large banana shallots
4 piquillo peppers
3 tablespoons bacon fat (use good lard if you can’t find any and do some exercise tomorrow)
1 sweet apple
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
5 tablespoons walnut oil
5 tablespoons grapeseed oil
1 teaspoon lemon thyme leaves, picked from stems
1 teaspoon honey
A few handfuls salad leaves
Salt and pepper

Chop the potatoes without peeling them into 1½ cm dice, and slice the shallots into rounds. Fry over a medium flame in a large pan using two tablespoons of the bacon fat, turning frequently, until golden (about 20-25 minutes). Ten minutes or so before the potatoes are ready, fry the peeled, halved black puddings in the remaining bacon fat for five minute on each side.

While the potatoes and black pudding are cooking, put the peppers under the grill, turning every few minutes, until the skins are blackened. Put them straight into an airtight plastic box and seal with the lid while you prepare the other ingredients. The steam from the peppers will help to release the skins. Peel the peppers after five minutes in the box, discarding the skins and reserving any juices. Halve them and slice into strips.

Chop the apple into small dice and make up the vinaigrette with the vinegar, honey, walnut and grape oils and any juices from the peppers, with a small pinch of salt. Stir through the apple and thyme and set aside.

When you are ready to put the dish together, stir the peppers into the hot potatoes. Now, normally I abhor the chi-chi “towers of things on a plate” thing, but this is a recipe it suits well. So get out a large pastry cutter to use as a template, and pile the potato mixture onto a plate. Use a sharp knife on a chopping board to dice the black pudding roughly and heap it on top of the potatoes. Top with a handful of salad and spoon the apple dressing over the top. Serve immediately.

7th August 2009

Steak with sweet pepper salsa

I love the silky, slippery texture of a roasted, peeled sweet pepper. Removing the seeds and skins is a job I relish – a cleaned pepper is velvety-smooth between the fingers, and once it gets to your mouth, that texture combined with the pepper’s natural sweetness makes for an experience far more sensuous than supper should be.

This is a good way to get out of a steak rut (you know the rut I mean – it’s the one with the chips and Hollandaise). I’ve served my steak, rested for a few minutes to allow the meat to soften up and release its juices, over a plateful of undressed pea tops, which you should be able to find in some supermarkets at this time of year. The meat juices and the salsa will dribble into the salad, like a particularly stupendous dressing. I served this with some buttered rice cooked in chicken stock – good, crusty bread will also be good (and this mixture of pea tops, salsa and steak will make a world-beating sandwich).

To serve two, you’ll need:

2 steaks of your choice – I used sirloins
5 sweet peppers – I used 2 pointy piquillo peppers and 3 bell peppers. Try to vary the colours, but don’t use any green ones; they won’t be sweet enough.
12 cherry tomatoes
½ red onion
1 large handful (25g) parsley
1 heaped teaspoon cumin seeds
1½ tablespoons balsamic vinegar
5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 pack pea tops, or another sweet, tender leaf
Salt and pepper

Take the steaks out of the fridge before you start and pop them to one side while you deal with the salsa, so they’re at room temperature when you come to cook them.

Rub the whole peppers with a couple of drops of olive oil and arrange in a baking tray. Cook at 180° C (350° F) for 20 minutes, until the skin is browned and blistering, and use tongs to put them in airtight freezer bags. Seal the bags and set aside while you prepare the other ingredients – this will give the steam rising from the flesh of the peppers time to loosen the skin, which will make peeling them much easier when they are cool.

Dice the onion and quarter the tomatoes. Put them in a mixing bowl and stir in the finely-chopped parsley. Toast the cumin seeds in a dry frying pan for a couple of minutes until they are giving up their aroma (be careful not to over-toast and burn them), and stir them into the bowl.

Use your fingers to peel the skins from the roast peppers, and remove their seeds. Discard the seeds and skins, chop the flesh of the peppers into chunks about the size of the pieces of tomato, and add them to the salsa. Pour the oil and vinegar over the other ingredients, stir well and set aside for the flavours to meld while you prepare the steaks.

To cook the steaks, rub them on both sides with salt and pepper, and grill or saute (I chucked mine on the barbecue) for a few minutes on each side until medium rare. Remove to a plate and rest for five minutes to allow the tissues of the meat to relax. Slice on the diagonal and lay the warm steak on a bed of pea tops. Taste the salsa for seasoning, add salt and pepper to taste, then spoon a generous helping on top of the steak. Serve with sunshine and a cold drink.

13th January 2009

Basque chicken

I seem to get through an awful lot of bell peppers at this time of year, when sunshine is a dim and distant memory. This dish is a rich and glossy version of the traditional Poulet Basquaise, where the sweetness of the peppers works deliciously against tiny pieces of salt pork and the savoury chicken.

I got hold of a strip of salt pork from the Polish deli in Newmarket. (Just off Fred Archer Way, by the short-stay carpark on Wellington St.) A lot of towns, especially here in East Anglia, now have Polish stores selling some really fantastic preserved meats like smoked sausages and fat salt pork. I’ve also been using our local one to stock up on soused herrings, some great pickles and the holy grail – cartons of cherry juice. If you have a Polish shop near you, go in at the weekend and have a rummage; you’ll find some really interesting ingredients and, if you’re lucky, will discover a new addiction to that cherry juice.

Salt pork is much fattier than English bacon, and it’s not smoked. Stock up if you find some; it keeps for months in the fridge. There should be more fat in a slice than meat. Here, I’ve rendered it down into crisp little nuggets, and have used the rich rendered fat to brown the chicken and soften the vegetables in this dish. If you can’t find salt pork where you are, fatty pancetta or even fatty bacon lardons will do the job nicely. To serve four, you’ll need:

100g salt pork
4 large chicken breasts
½ teaspoon caster sugar
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pepper
2 tablespoons paprika
1 teaspoon fennel
3 bayleaves
1 teaspoon dried pimento chillies
2 red peppers
2 green peppers
1 yellow pepper
4 cloves garlic
1 banana shallot
1 medium onion
4 stalks celery
2 glasses wine
2 glasses chicken stock
500g passata
1 tablespoon tomato purée
2 tablespoons crème fraîche
Salt and pepper
Parsley to garnish

Slice the peppers into strips, and put them aside in a bowl. Put the diced shallot and onion and diced celery in another bowl with the crushed garlic. Rub the chicken breasts with the sugar, salt and pepper.

Cut the salt pork into small dice (about half a centimetre) and put in a large, heavy-based casserole dish. Cook over a low to medium heat, stirring occasionally, until all the fat has rendered out and the dice of pork are tiny and golden. Turn the heat up to medium-high and brown the whole chicken breasts on all sides in the fat. When they are golden all over, remove them to a plate with a slotted spoon. Turn the heat back down to medium-low.

Add the paprika, bay leaves, crushed chillies and fennel seeds to the pan with the shallots, onion, celery and garlic. Sauté in the remaining fat (adding a little olive oil if you think it’s necessary) for about five minutes, until the vegetables are soft. Add the peppers to the pan and cook for another five minutes, keeping everything on the move, then return the chicken to the pan along with any juices, stirring well so the paprika mixture coats everything.

Add the wine to the dish, and let it bubble up to a simmer. Pour in the stock and passata and stir a tablespoon of concentrated tomato purée through the mixture. Put the lid on and simmer for 30-40 minutes. Stir through the crème fraîche just before serving, and garnish with parsley.

I served this with sautéed potatoes. It’s also great with buttered rice and a salad.

15th October 2008

Roasted butternut squash and red pepper soup with garlic parmesan croutons

Just in time for you to buy the ingredients before Halloween, here’s a seasonal soup. (When I mentioned to Dr W that I was making a Halloween soup, his response was: “Ooh. Will it have blood and pus?” Sorry, love. It’s only got squash and peppers.)

The pumpkins you buy for carving don’t have the sweet, chestnutty character of many of the smaller squashes, so they’re better kept for carving and putting on the windowledge. A pumpkin-type soup is better made with something like a butternut squash instead, which has a great flavour and texture, and can be a bit easier to handle than some of the rounder squashes. In this recipe, the vegetables that make up the soup are all roasted. The squash will caramelise nuttily, the peppers become sweet and silky…and surely, there can’t be anything nicer than a roast onion? I’ve topped the lot off with some gorgeously savoury, crispy garlic and parmesan croutons. Halloween heaven.

To serve 4, you’ll need:

Soup
1 large butternut squash
5 large red peppers
5 small onions
1 litre stock (I used some home-made chicken stock)
1 tablespoon paprika
½ teaspoon ground coriander
Juice of 1 lime
20g butter
Olive oil to drizzle
Salt and pepper
Fresh coriander to garnish

Croutons
½ loaf white bread (unsliced)
4 grated cloves garlic
1 handful grated parmesan
4 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat the oven to 180°C (340°F). Peel the butternut squash and cut it into chunks about an inch square. Arrange them on a baking tray and drizzle generously with olive oil. Peel and quarter the onions, and put them on another baking tray, cut side up. Dot with the butter and drizzle with a little more olive oil, then sprinkle with salt.

Put the squash and onions in the oven, and roast for 40 minutes, basting once. When the 40 minutes are up, put the peppers (on another baking tray, and rubbed gently with olive oil) in the oven, baste the squash and onions once more, and continue to roast everything for a further 20 minutes. The butternut squash should be soft and turning a sticky, caramel-brown at the edges, the onions should be browning nicely, and the peppers should be wrinkly. Set the squash and onions aside, and put the peppers in a plastic freezer bag. Seal and leave until the peppers have cooled. The steam coming off the peppers will loosen the skin and make them easy to peel – once cooled, you can slip the skins off.

Saute the paprika and coriander in a tablespoon of olive oil in a large saucepan for one minute, then add the squash, onions and peeled peppers to the pan. Saute gently, stirring, for five minutes, then pour over the stock, and bring to a simmer for five minutes. Puree the soup in a food processor (you’ll need to do this in batches) and push the resulting puree through a seive, back into the large pan. Add the lime juice, which will push the flavour of the peppers to the fore, taste for seasoning and leave the soup to one side while you make the croutons.

To make the croutons, preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F). Cut the crusts off the half loaf and discard. Chop the white part of the loaf into cubes about 2cm on each side (a large-ish crouton is nice here, the outside turning crisp and the inside retaining a bit of squashiness). Arrange the croutons on a baking sheet. Grate the garlic into the olive oil, mix well and drizzle over the croutons. Toss them well in the oil so every side is covered with the garlicky mixture, then sprinkle over the parmesan and toss again. Bake in the hot oven for ten minutes until golden, but start checking after eight minutes – these are quite easy to burn.

Warm the soup through, sprinkle with croutons and garnish with a bit of fresh coriander.

21st July 2008

Padron peppers – Spanish roulette

One of the things I love about tapas is that they’re often so easy to prepare. Slice a chorizo, pour over red wine, stick in pan, reduce, eat. Slice some manchego and quince cheese. Eat. Place olives in small bowl. Eat. Put prawns in dish with olive oil, garlic and chillies. Make hot. Eat. Procure a ham. Slice. Eat.

Given that tapas are there primarily as a salty accompaniment to your drink, these simple, clear flavours make a lot of sense. The quality of raw ingredients in preparations like this becomes all-important, and often the best of those raw ingredients are the seasonal ones. Enter the Padron pepper.

These little green jewels are a deliciously sweet, fresh-tasting pepper which comes ready in the summer. They are, for the most part, delightfully mild – but one in every ten or so has a strong chilli kick. There is nothing better than a dish that engages your sense of danger. The Spanish have a saying: Pimiento de Padrón, pequeño pero matón. Translated very approximately, this means: “Padron pepper – teensy-weensy thug”.

To serve two as a nibble with drinks or as a starter, you’ll need:

150-200g Padron peppers (see below for suppliers)
5 tablespoons olive oil
A generous sprinkling of sea salt

Heat the olive oil in a large pan to a medium temperature, and drop the peppers in. Stir the peppers in the oil for about four minutes, until their skins are blistering. Remove the peppers to bowls with a slotted spoon, sprinkle over plenty of salt, and serve piping hot. To eat, hold the peppers by the stem and bite off the whole fruit. Keep a glass of something cold to hand in case you get one of the very spicy ones.

It’s worth getting your hands on some Padron peppers at this time of year, when they are at their very best. I’ve seen them in Waitrose, but if you don’t have a local branch you can also order them online in the UK at Little Green Men, where they have some great chilli products.

28th September 2007

Sweet pepper salad

I’ve given quantities here for four diners, but you should be aware that this is one of those things that people will ask for seconds and thirds of, so cook a generous amount. This is a lovely sunshine-filled salad, assertively flavoured with garlic, fresh lemon juice, sweetly salty anchovies, and good olive oil.

The peppers are grilled and peeled before the salad is assembled. This makes them much more digestible (many people’s stomachs are bothered by the indigestible skins of peppers in quantity), and gives them a wonderfully satiny texture. Allow your peppers to macerate in the fridge overnight (or preferably for two or three days), and you’ll find that all the flavours in the dish meld sweetly into a gorgeous golden, silky whole.

To serve four, you’ll need:

6 peppers – use a mix of red, yellow and orange
½ a lemon
4 anchovies in oil
3 cloves garlic
8 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper

Start by cutting each pepper into three or four segments (you’ll be able to see the pepper’s ribs – just cut along these). Discard the stalk and seeds, and lay the segments out, skin side up, on the grill tray.

Grill the peppers until the skins are brown and blistering. Put all the segments into a plastic freezer bag and knot the top, then leave the bag alone for about twenty minutes. The peppers will steam gently inside the bag, loosening their skins. When the peppers are cool, unseal the bag and start to peel the skins off. You’ll find they come away easily. Do this over a bowl to catch any drips of sweet juice.

Cut the peeled segments of pepper into slim strips and put them in the bowl with the juice. Add the garlic, crushed or grated, the chopped anchovies, the lemon juice and the olive oil. Mix well, cover and refrigerate. The peppers will get better and better as they macerate, so feel free to leave them for up to three days – just remove them from the fridge a couple of hours before serving so they can come up to a toothsome room temperature.