To Grind Peppercorns:
You can buy several types of peppercorns from Savory Spice Shop – they ship as well as have brick & mortar stores – and offer high quality black peppercorns . We buy what is called Tellicherry, and make it suitable for all uses by grinding it.
Grinding your own pepper is a way to keep more flavor in the pepper you use at the table or to season what you cook. Just think about how wonderful pepper is with – what comes to mind first for me – Parmesan cheese.
We have a hand mill that works perfectly for grinding pepper. In a pinch, we use it to grind coffee beans but the consistency of the grind is coarse to medium to fine and not perfect for making a great cup of coffee in our Chemex. But this variety is perfect for pepper.
We rarely use the whole peppercorn. It is very hard unless cooked in liquid for a long time and even then is very intense. Use it whole if it can be submerged for a long time, and you plan to remove it entirely. For example, in stocks or marinates where the liquid is strained. This way no small bit of pepper remains, just the flavor.
We pour about 4 or so tablespoons of peppercorns from the Savory bag into the grinder and turn until tired, or all ground. The grinds land in the drawer that we remove and pour through a semi-fine sieve.
The coarse grind – what remains in the sieve – goes in one spice container, and is used in crackers, mixed with Parmesan for pizza topping or pasta – wherever you want a distinct bit of pepper.
The fine in placed in another container, and is what we use everyday at the table or in sauces and dishes where you want the flavor but not the bite.
About Pepper Varieties:
Pepper – the spice – gets its heat from the chemical piperine, which is not the same as capsicum that makes a New Mexico or other fleshy pepper hot.
Black pepper comes from the still-green, unripe drupe of the pepper plant. The drupes are cooked briefly in hot water, both to clean them and to prepare them for drying. Cooked and dried is what distinguishes black pepper
White pepper consists solely of the seed of the ripe fruit of the pepper plant, with the thin darker-coloured skin (flesh) of the fruit removed.
Green pepper are the dried unripe fruit.
Tellicherry pepper comes from the Malabar Coast of India, originally from Thalassery, in North Kerala, which was formerly called Tellicherry. According to Spiceology, the term Tellicherry means the pepper drupes were allowed to stay on the vine longer and grew to at least 4.25mm in diameter. This time on the vine allows them to develop more complex flavor.