The New Complete Book of Food
will otherwise curl up into a hard, unpalatable strip. Immerse the pepper in hot water, then
lift it out and plunge it into cold water. The hot water bath damages a layer of cells under the
skin so that the skin is very easy to peel off. Roasting the peppers produces the same result.
Hot peppers. never handle any variety of hot peppers with your bare hands. Hot peppers
contain large amounts of the naturally occurring irritants capsaicin (pronounced cap-say-i-
sun), nordyhydrocapsaicin, and dihydrocapsaicin. These chemicals cause pain by latching on
to special sites called receptors on the surface of nerve cells, opening small channels in the
cells that permit calcium particles to flood in. The calcium particles trigger the pain reaction.
Exposure to high temperatures, like a burn, produces the same effect.
Capsaicins irritate the lining of your mouth and esophagus (which is why they cause
heartburn). They can burn unprotected skin and mucous membranes. Capsaicins dissolve in
milk fat and alcohol, but not water. They cannot simply be washed off your hands.
NOTE: Capsaicin extracted from hot peppers and applied to the skin as the active
ingredient in a cream or ointment is an effective over-the-counter pain remedy. In addition,
in a 1991 study at the University of Florence (Italy), 39 men and women suffering from
cluster headaches (a form of migraine) obtained relief by squirting a capsaicin-containing
solution into the nostril on the headache side of the face. WARNING: the capsaicin used to
relieve pain is a purified, medical-gr ade product extr acted from peppers. hot peppers them-
selves do not relieve pain and should never be applied to skin or mucous membr anes.What Happens When You Cook This Food
Chlorophyll, the pigment that makes green vegetables green, is sensitive to acids. When you
heat green peppers, the chlorophyll in the flesh will react chemically with acids in the pep-
per or in the cooking water, forming pheophytin, which is brown. The pheophytin makes a
cooked pepper olive-drab or (if the pepper has a lot of yellow carotenes) bronze.
To keep cooked green peppers green, you have to keep the chlorophyll from reacting
with acids. One way to do this is to cook peppers in a large quantity of water (which dilutes
the acids), but this increases the loss of vitamin C. A second alternative is to cook them in
a pot with the lid off so that the volatile acids float off into the air. Or you can stir-fry the
peppers, cooking them so fast that there is almost no time for the chlorophyll/acid reaction
to occur.
When long cooking is inevitable, as with stuffed sweet green peppers, the only remedy
is to smother the peppers in sauce so that it doesn’t matter what color the peppers are. (Red
and yellow peppers won’t fade; their carotenoid pigments are impervious to heat.)
Because vitamin C is sensitive to heat, cooked peppers have less than fresh peppers.
But peppers have so much vitamin C to begin with that even cooked peppers are a good
source of this nutrient.How Other Kinds of Processing Affect This Food
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