Hot peppers, sweet peppers, bell peppers: what’s the difference?
It’s not always easy to find your way around all these fruiting vegetables from the Capsicum genus belonging to the Solanaceae family, which tend to resemble each other visually but whose taste can be particularly surprising and even pungent! These are all heat-loving plants (10°C minimum) that are very sensitive to cold, as they originate from Central America.
The sweetest peppers
The bell pepper is really the chili pepper’s cousin, but its fruit has a much milder flavor, so it’s also called “sweet pepper”. In addition, they are much larger, more or less fleshy, with a hollow interior containing seeds. Its colors vary from green to red to yellow, depending on the variety.
Hot peppers, mild peppers, sweet peppers, how to find your way around?
It’s eaten raw in a variety of salads, but can also be preserved in vinegar or oil. When cooked, it can be stuffed, grilled, fried or sautéed, and can be used in a ratatouille or couscous, for example.
Paprika is also made from dried and ground red peppers: this red spice is used in Hungarian goulash, escabeche sauce and chorizo in Spain, one of the world’s biggest pepper-producing countries.
