Roasted Peppers for the Win

How to make roasted marinated peppers for peak pepper season

A lot of what happens in my kitchen revolves more around techniques than recipes. Take roasted peppers—any recipe telling you how to make them presumes to know things the recipe writer cannot know. 

Like, do you cook with gas or electric? Is your broiler in the top of your oven or do you have a broiler drawer? How hot does the broiler get, and how many inches from that heat source is your food?

I decided to make a batch of roasted peppers because my husband, Dan, the mischievous gremlin that fills our digital Philly Food Works shopping cart most weeks, kept on ordering local, seasonal peppers by the pound: Delilah, Hungarian wax, Jimmy Nardello, Krimzon Lee, and our usual favorite, poblano. They’d been piling up.

If you’ve only had jarred roasted red peppers, you should know that the homemade kind are many orders of magnitude better. The jarred ones are usually packed in water, which dilutes their flavor and ruins their texture, if you ask me. Home roasted peppers deliver a rounded, concentrated, nuanced flavor that reflects the fruitiness and spiciness of the raw pepper. They’re silky and tender and carry a whiff of smoke from the process of charring them.   

Here’s how you do it: Set the broiler to high.

Arrange your peppers on a baking sheet lined with a wire rack. To make cleanup easy, line the bottom with aluminum foil if you wish—I do it the hard way and scrub them after because of our commitment to minimize waste, but I think this is a pretty reasonable use of a sheet of aluminum foil. 

Position them as close to the broiler element as you can without risking a fire (about 2 to 4 inches). Char the peppers, rotating them as needed, until thoroughly blistered and blackened over their entire exterior. The closer they are to the broiler, and the hotter it is, the more you’ll need to rotate them. When done, move the blackened peppers to a bowl and cover with a silicone lid or plastic wrap. Let them steam and cool—this makes it easier to remove the skins.

There’s really no way I can tell you how long this takes or how often to turn them, because of the variables I mentioned. You want them to look burned, though, like something you might think was ruined if you didn’t know better. 

After the peppers are cool enough to handle (around 30 minutes), peel off the skins. Remove and discard (or, you know, compost) the stems and seeds. Roughly chop the pepper flesh.

I tossed my recent batch with nothing more than extra virgin olive oil and minced garlic. You could get significantly fancier by adding vinegar and spices. I wanted to keep these fairly versatile and there’s rarely an occasion in my kitchen that I don’t want olive oil and garlic. 

I used these up in polenta bowls topped with black beans and the peppers. But their uses are endless. They make a wonderful topping for grilled toast or addition to burritos, tacos, and quesadillas. Pureed, they can provide the flavorful backbone of soup, sauce, or a dip. Chopped fine and mixed with red onion and cilantro, you’ve got a roasted pepper salsa.

After I made and tasted these peppers, I added them to my “Wins of the Week” list. Wins of the week was a project I led for a small group of friends in 2022. The idea is simply to keep track of your wins, big and small, and share them with others on Fridays.  

Just a couple weeks ago, I found a new Wins of the Week partner and started the practice again. The peppers were in my first round of wins. Not all of my wins are food and cooking related, but because I spend a lot of time in my kitchen, many of them are. 

Tell me here: What’s a recent kitchen win for you? Let’s celebrate them together. I want to give you a virtual high-five.

PS: I published my first post-layoff article this week. And it happens to be all about peppers—spicy peppers. Check out Your Body on Spicy Food over at Everyday Health!