Ingredients · Spice

White Pepper

Piper nigrum · Piperaceae (pepper family)

White Pepper
The same berry as black pepper, picked ripe and treated completely differently. White pepper is made by retting: the ripe berries are soaked in water for about a week until the flesh softens, then rubbed clean down to the pale inner seed. That soaking is why it tastes the way it does — sharper and more direct than black pepper, less aromatic, with a faintly earthy, fermented note black pepper does not have. It is used where black flecks would spoil the look of a dish, and it is standard in much of Chinese, Thai and Portuguese cooking.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partBerry
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromIndonesia
TasteSharper and more direct than black pepper, less aromatic, with a faintly earthy fermented note

How to use it

Where you want the heat and not the specks: béchamel, mashed potato, cream soups, white sauces, mayonnaise, pale gravies. In hot-and-sour soup and much of Chinese cooking, where it is the default pepper rather than a substitute. Grind it fresh like any pepper. It is sharper than black, so use a little less than you would.

With food

Cream and butter sauces. Potato. Chicken and white fish. Eggs. Cauliflower. Soup. Pork.

With spices

Salt. Nutmeg and mace in a béchamel. Bay. Ginger and garlic in Chinese cooking. Star anise.

With tea

Not a tea ingredient.

Its story

Where it comes from

The plant is native to South Asia, but white pepper in particular is associated with Bangka Island in Indonesia, whose western port Mentok gives Muntok white pepper its trade name, and with Sarawak. Our lot origin is unconfirmed.

What happened

White pepper's history is black pepper's — the Malabar Coast, the Roman cargo ships riding the monsoon, Alaric's ransom of Rome in 408, Vasco da Gama at Calicut in 1498 — because they are the same vine. What is its own is the process. Sacks of ripe berries sunk in running streams for a week is the picture usually given of retting, and it is what separates the two peppers: not a different plant, not a different grade, but a week in water. The heat in both is piperine, which the Danish chemist Hans Christian Orsted isolated in 1819, and which is roughly a hundredth as potent as capsaicin.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

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