We got a marinated grilled and roasted peppers and serve them as an appetizer. Peppers naturally have a lot of sugar and if you can bring it out, you could really get that sweetness from the pepper.
Now before you start, you could coat this with olive oil and put them into an oven that way or you could just put them. We could turn on the stove. We could turn on the heat. Turn the flames on the stove and just place the peppers over the top and turn them every few minutes until the outsides are black and blistered. You see the skins will peel right off.
What I’ve chosen to do for this recipe is to bake them. Put them in an oven to 500º for about 30 minutes but I didn’t put in the oven right here because we want to keep the fat content down. So, after this has been a half hour in the oven, it would come out looking a little bit like this here. Now you see how the skins blister and they blackened.
Now, once they’ve roasted, it’s a good idea. What I do once they’ve roasted, I’ve taken them away from the heat. I place them into a dish like so you cover them. Now what happens during this process is that the steam from the heat of the peppers builds inside this container if you will and that’s sweating. The sweating of the peppers it really loses the skins off and makes it easy so go ahead and peel them. So that’s the first step.
For the next step is to peel the peppers. Now, peppers come in different colors also. As the colors of people even with their eyes before they actually taste anything in their mouth so we want to present a lot of color. One that people are interested in it in before they sit down or a pick a fork. And we can do that with all the different colors.
Now, so the first thing I’m going to do is turn this grill on because I’m going to grill it in a minute. That’s done. It’s a little bit tricky so be careful but if you take of it, it does wonders when you catch them. It holds the heat very evenly and it’s beautiful the way it treats the food. These are also a couple of the cuisines here. Now with this advances that they’re heavy and the first cuts could have be right along side the peppers like this. We’re going to open it up and I’m going to get rid of the seeds.
Once that’s done, turn it over inside side up and get them open both them up that way. You can pull the seeds out. Now, the white parts on the inside, if they’re still here, it’s good to get rid of those even when the peppers are raw. That part has a tendency to be bitter at times. The sweetness and the heat of a hot pepper are all the inside. They’re on the inside of the meat. If you could remove the membrane that holds the heat, look at the jalapeno pepper, opened it up and took that membrane off the inside. It would be as sweet as a bell pepper.
So once we’ve got them turned over like this, I’m just going to cut them into pieces that are manageable and the next thing that we’re going to do is to take the skin right off like so. Now for this recipe, once we have these skins peeled off, we’re going to cut them into wide strips and then we’re going to dress them on the marinade, cut them into pieces, wide strips. I like to knife, the tops and the bottoms off them also. It makes a nice presentation there. We have a nice uniform piece of pepper like this here. Again, tops and bottom.
Now to this bowl here, I have some peppers that are ready to go. We have a little bit of oil. I want to take the time and show you folks how to roast the pepper. To the bowl, we’re going to start to marinate. My procedure for the garlic, the first thing we do is we cut the clove in half. Now, if you look on the inside, sometimes it had that core, it will be best to get that out. These are pretty clean. I don’t see a core inside those.
So almost go for it. Now, I lay the garlic. Once this is cut in half, I lay it down the cutting board. It’s best to smash it. It preserves the oil but the flavor in the garlic isn’t an oil. And if you do a lot of chopping, they’ll all run from the fruit. So what I do is I smash it like this here. And that’s about three, that’s it like so.
So now the next ingredient to go into the marinade is going to be some pitted Kalamata olives here. We’re going to lay them down. I’m going to end up with probably about a tablespoon. I’ll put a rough chop on them. These are Greek olives. The next ingredients are shallots. Shallots are in the onion family. They’re sweeter than onions. They’re a lot milder. They’re nice to use when you’re doing a little bit of fire presentation.
Onions are good rough chopped as soups and stuff like that but especially I’m going to serve something raw. I want to use something that’s not as pungent like an onion. With this kind of onion, that flavor is actually sulfur. The shallots are a lot milder than onion. So we’re going to put some shallots in here. They’ve been chopped fine.
And the next ingredient we’re going to pour out is called tomato concose. In France, the French chefs what they do with the tomato is to bring out that tomato flavor and get the taste of the water out of it. So what you do is I have a pot of water that boils on the stove. And I cut an “X” in the bottom of my tomato. I drop in it for just a minute. I just want to cook that skin really. It’s all I want to do because once the skin cooks I can take it off the fruit. So, the first step is to take the skin off and we’re going to peel it. These have been blanched and once you’re through, the skin comes right off.
The next step, I cut the tomato right on half across the belly. Now it exposes the inside of tomato. It’s much easy to get. What you want to get out is the seeds and the water that holds the seeds. So I’m going to hold it all. I’m going to just take this. And I’m going to squeeze it and maybe just kind of give it a little encouragement with my finger here. Just to get it so that you want the meat of the tomato here.
Again with the other piece, just give it a little squeeze. I want to take those seeds right out. Then we’re going to dice these tomatoes. We’re going to place it down and then I’m going to cut this in a half like so through the core. I remove the core and I’m going to make a cut. I want to get the core out. Again, just a V-cut, I’ll put it and place it down and make a cut of V around that core.
The next step would be to dice the tomatoes so I’m going hold it like so and make these slices along the tomato. And then I just give it a quick turn like so and we’re going to dice the tomatoes. Now, that goes right in with the marinade and the peppers.
Now the next ingredient we’ll add to this, capers. These are capers. They’re branch from a tree in Turkey. They’re really hard when they come off the tree. It’s like an olive. You can either taper off the fruit. You can just took an olive up a tree, it’s like a rock so we’re going to soak in a brine salt oil and once they soften up then it will be kind of firm and we ship them and they will help us make this marinated peppers.
Now the next step, I’m going to put one ounce of each olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Just a toss of the olive oil, we got one ounce and equal amount of the balsamic, one ounce. Perfect! We’re going to toss them together like so.
Now once we’re at this stage, I would let this sit for at least 30 minutes. On the refrigeration, I’ve taken the liberty to go ahead a little bit. Prepared the marinade so I go right ahead now to the grill.
So here we are. Place the peppers. Skin side, that was formally skin side down on top of the grill. They have variety of colors. Okay, green peppers and yellow peppers and red peppers. This dish you could serve it as an appetizer or salad or you can even use the peppers as an accompaniment to all the grilled food. It was perfect for the summer time backyard barbecue type of thing. I would go ahead and grill them this way. We could even allow them to be served at a room temperature. Actually it will taste better. Our barbecues taste food better at room temperature than any of the temperature.
Now, I’ve also prepared a garnish with this plate for this. If I was going to serve this as an appetizer, I would take bread and slice it to very thin slices like this here. Brush them with olive oil, maybe a little salt, maybe even a little bit of garlic and grill them right down the grill where we temporarily we’re going to make the peppers on. Do them ahead of time so that they’re ready. So when the peppers come off the grill, we’re ready to right to go the presentation.
I’ve also grilled a couple of eggplant slices. Again, we talked about eggplant a little bit earlier also. Eggplant has a tendency when it’s really fresh. It has a bitter flavor so the way to bring that out is with salt. We could prepare the eggplant by slicing it and then soak it in salt water or you could exactly do the same thing. However, you’re going to cut the eggplant and sprinkle with salt and let it sit in a colander and we’ll see the water will come right out of it and has the bitterness of the eggplant fruit also.
Now these are about ready. So we’re going to go ahead. I’m going to place this right in the center of the plate. We grill the marinated peppers with grilled eggplant and serve with slices of grilled garlic bread.
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