Grilled bell peppers

Grilled pepper fillets, ready to serve from the jar

Grilled peppers from Primopasto are peeled pepper fillets, grilled over an open flame, hand-peeled, and preserved in sunflower oil. They arrive at your home ready to serve, saving you the work of grilling, steaming, and skinning.

The grilled peppers from Primopasto, or "peperoni grigliati" in Italian, are red and yellow pepper fillets in a 280-gram jar. Grilled, skinned, seasoned with wine vinegar and salt, and preserved in sunflower oil. This eliminates all the work that typically goes into preparing good antipasti peppers.

Grilling, steaming, skinning—it's all been done

Anyone who grills peppers themselves knows the process: char them over a flame, put them in a bowl under a cloth, wait, then peel off the skin. Half an hour for two peppers.

That exact process is inside the jar, just on a larger scale. The peppers are harvested fully ripe, grilled, cleaned by hand, and cut into fillets. The grilling caramelizes the fruit sugars and intensifies the sweet note that raw peppers only hint at.

The result is fleshy, soft strips with a slightly smoky edge, sweet and tart at the same time thanks to the wine vinegar. Fruity, smoky, mild. The consistency remains firm enough that the fillets can be speared with a fork instead of falling apart.

The peppers are preserved in sunflower oil rather than olive oil, which may come as a surprise. The reason is flavor: sunflower oil remains neutral, keeping the pepper in the foreground, whereas a robust olive oil would take over. If you still want that Mediterranean touch, simply pour a little of your own olive oil over them when serving.

On the antipasti platter and in everything else

Served straight from the jar, they make an appetizer with a bit of your own oil, coarse pepper, and white bread. No further preparation is needed.

A splash of lemon, some flat-leaf parsley, and a finely chopped clove of garlic turn them into a standalone salad in a minute. If you like, add capers or a few anchovy fillets, and the appetizer becomes almost a meal in itself.

Furthermore, they can be used just like freshly grilled peppers: with mozzarella or buffalo mozzarella, on pizza, in a frittata, in pasta salad, or served with cooked meat or fish. Finely pureed, they form the base of a pepper cream or can be included in a bagna cauda, the warm Piedmontese anchovy sauce.

On a mixed platter, they sit well alongside grilled mushrooms and red onions. Once opened, the jar belongs in the refrigerator, and the remaining fillets should remain covered by the oil, in which case they will keep for a good week.

Primopasto and a family business in the Abruzzo region

Primopasto is the private label under which Antonio Viani bundles table olives and preserved vegetables. It includes around 20 items, from olives to artichokes and Borettane onions to sun-dried tomatoes and small capers.

The vegetables come from Ralò, a family business in the Abruzzo region, where peppers, Borettane onions, and artichokes are processed harvest-fresh, grilled, seasoned, and preserved. The olives in the line, on the other hand, come from a Venetian producer that has specialized in them since 1955. Both businesses are personally selected by Viani, including on-site visits.

The fact that sunflower oil rather than olive oil is used makes the jars more affordable, incidentally. Grilled peppers in good olive oil easily cost twice as much without the vegetables themselves being any better.

It is common in the gourmet trade for an importer to have its own labels; it only gets interesting when they reveal who is behind them. The jars are brought to the shelf by the family business Antonio Viani Importe; you can find more preserves under Antipasti and preserves. Open the jar, fill the plate.

Content 280 g – Drained weight 160 g