Tasting Expert Reveals the Best Black Peppercorns

before peppercorns were used as a spice on the table they were used as medicine and currency the romans kept a lot of pepper on hand and they used it as ransom to keep the visigoths and nutella of the han at bay at least for a little while now the dutch have a term called pippadur which means costly and i think i'm in front of a test that may cost me my career i'm here with jack he's going to explain peppercorns and tell us which one we should buy i'm a little scared i'm kind of intimidated here feel at ease no money will change hands no matter the results and no one will be hurt would a 20 change things though no okay so we mix these with white rice all right i will tell you this was a hard tasting to do when we cracked the peppercorns in our favorite mill so these are all whole black peppercorns 10 different brands we felt like after two samples the palette was obliterated you couldn't taste anything in a lot of cooking applications i'll be honest with you you really couldn't tell much of a difference we found like an egg salad you could tell a difference but even in something like steak or puave once you cook with the peppercorns they all taste like peppercorns and you would think that's a dish where you would really taste it some of them are tella cherry some of them are not tell telecherry simply means that it is a large peppercorn at least four millimeters that comes from india we ended up measuring all the peppercorns no matter their source whether it was from vietnam or india and turns out almost all of the brands here would have qualified based on the size to be telecherry but of course they have to be not only large but from india to be labeled telecherry i gotcha the reason why that is so important is because the larger the peppercorn the more you get the other things besides the heat i mean a good black pepper yes it's bringing some spice but you're getting citrus you're getting woodsy pine you're getting some warm spice and those are all things that make food taste even more delicious so any initial impressions about the many bowls of white rice well as i'm going down this one down here doesn't seem to have the same heat as some of the others all right is it time for me to fess up there's a ringer you put a ringer in here well there's always a ringer that's true you're the ringer the reason why they're five samples is one of them is with pre-ground pepper now jack you lied to me because you told me that they were all whole i guess once they were all whole peppercorns right they were born as whole peppercorns we really felt like that was 100 times more important than brand was to get a whole peppercorn put it into your own pepper mill and grind it yourself the two things that are the difference are texture it gets dried out and woody basically sawdust right freshly ground pepper is softer second thing and more important is flavor that yes you still get the heat in pre-ground pepper but you get no citrus you get no warm spice you get no clove you get no pine you get nothing other than spicy spice i would say that my two favorites are these two this one especially i think there's a really nice balance in here this one is your favorite yes oh my god is that our winner we get that as our winner all right this is a close second well this was our runner-up from penzey's so this is a tell a cherry it's a mail order brand i'd like that one too so i have a sophisticated palette is what you're saying you like to pay more i have a sophisticated palette that's what i said this one mccormick oh okay this one ground now wait a minute is this pre-ground out of a bottle is this pre-ground that you did no it's pre-ground out of this really yes and this is actually the same brand as this as this and and we found it doesn't matter if you buy the best brand out there if it's pre-ground i mean this is like enough ground pepper for i don't know 10 years exactly but this is the biggest mistake you can make even though it seems like oh it's such a good deal i have to say in terms of ground black pepper it ain't so bad and then this one this is another mail order brand kalustians okay this one had some mushroomy earthy notes that some of the tasters didn't really love it tasted a little bit old musty was the word that the tasters were using there you go our winner is the tones whole black peppercorns and it's two dollars for a two ounce bottle thanks for watching america's test kitchen what'd you think well leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or you can just say hello you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later i'll see you later

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 174,680

Keywords: cooking, cooks illustrated, americas test kitchen, cooks country, black pepper, black peppercorns, tasting, taste test, ingredient tasting

Id: VfmRqEoI1Gs

Length: 4min 38sec (278 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021