Pimientos – grilled bell peppers

Pimientos, grilled Piquillo peppers from Navarra

The Pimientos from La Cocina de Lola are grilled Piquillo peppers from Lodosa in Navarra, roasted over an open flame and peeled by hand. Sweet, smoky, meaty – ready-to-serve Spanish tapas from a jar.

Pimientos del Piquillo are small, pointed peppers from the north of Spain, here grilled by La Cocina de Lola and preserved in their own juice. The Pimientos are ready to enjoy: intensely red, triangular, with meaty flesh and a sweet, smoky note from the grill. Open the jar, and the South is on your plate.

Sweet, smoky, meaty

The Pimientos smell of roasted peppers, sweet and slightly smoky, as if they had just come off the embers.

On the palate, they are mild and meaty, with no heat at all, and have a natural sweetness that only develops through roasting over a flame. They consist of 99.7 percent peppers, with only a little sea salt and a touch of citric acid added. This means you taste one thing above all else: ripe, grilled peppers.

When you cut open a pod, you can see the thick, compact flesh that makes these Pimientos so special. It remains beautifully stable when filled and does not fall apart—a small advantage that fresh peppers do not always offer.

For filling, tapas, and salads

These peppers are ready to serve and can be used in a variety of ways, from the tapas platter to hot dishes.

Their meaty flesh is wonderful to fill, classically with a fish or cream cheese farce. On a tapas platter, they provide a splash of red color alongside creamy aioli and a glass of cold gazpacho. They go just as well with cold cuts, in an omelet, with cooked meat or fish, or sliced into strips on crusty bread.

Briefly sautéed for two minutes in olive oil with a clove of garlic and served lukewarm, they reveal their aroma most beautifully. They have a place as a side dish for grilled meat or as a topping on a tortilla—two or three pods are enough as a small appetizer.

You can use Pimientos just like fresh peppers, but without the work: no grilling, no peeling. The pods love to be filled, but they are just as good chopped up in rice, pasta, or on pizza.

Roasted over an open flame, peeled by hand

For these Pimientos, ripe red peppers from Lodosa in Navarra are roasted over an open flame, not cooked in a water bath.

The 8 to 10 cm long Piquillo peppers are native to the region around Lodosa, where they have been grown for generations. After roasting, they are peeled by hand, marinated with a little salt, and preserved in their own juice—not watered down, not boiled. This is exactly what gives them their concentrated, sweet, and smoky flavor.

The Piquillos have their ancestral home around Lodosa and Mendavia on the Ebro, and in Spain, these small, pointed pods are considered the finest peppers of all. The fact that they are harvested by hand and roasted individually over fire makes them elaborate to produce—and that is exactly what you taste.

These Spanish peppers reach us via the gourmet importer Antonio Viani, and you can find more from the brand at La Cocina de Lola, along with aioli and gazpacho for a complete Spanish evening.

Contents 290g – Drained weight 260g