One question we often get asked at Sly's is, "Why are the pepper shakers almost empty?" (Or, I suppose if you're more optimistic type, "Why are the pepper shakers only partly full?"
The answer is pretty straightforward and simple:We want the pepper to be fresh. So, we fill them up very little, so we can refill them more often and get the most aromatic and flavorful pepper we can. We think it makes a difference. We think that great quality pepper makes a difference everywhere, even when you want to add a little bit on your food at the table. A lot of restaurants might buy ground pepper of questionable freshness - it has little aroma, and might serve better as an irritant than as a spice.
Like most everything else at Sly's. we go to a lot of trouble to get you great quality pepper.
While more than 30% of the world's pepper now comes from Vietnam, we source our black pepper at Sly's from India's Malabar Coast, on the west side of the continent. The kind of pepper we order is called Malabar pepper. Malabar is not the most expensive, or the largest berry pepper - that's probably Tellicherry, but we think Malabar is the most flavorful. We order the whole Malabar pepper "berries" from a spice specialty company calledPenzey's. We buy 20 or 30 pounds at a time. It arrives in a thick plastic bag, in a thick cardboard carton, sealed with packing tape. Even so, the perfume of the pepper is outrageously strong - outside the box! This is the good stuff.
We store the Malabar peppercorns in the freezer, to keep the volatile oils as fresh as possible, and grind what we need every other day or so. When we need to put pepper in the pepper shakers, it's ground on a burr type grinder, sieved, and filled in the shakers. The result is fresh smelling pepper that tastes, well, better. (Don't worry, we use the whole peppercorns in the peppergrinders the servers use in the dining room)
You can really taste the difference in the quality pepper when you order our Pepper Steak Walding, which is liberally covered in the aromatic pepper and served with a wonderful Cognac Pepper sauce. I like mine rare!
"And how about the salt shakers, they're not very full either!" That's correct - but with the salt shakers, it's more a matter of asthetics than of freshness. To be sure, we use terrific salt at Sly's - 100% sea salt, minimally processed. You will notice a bit of rice in the salt shaker - that's to absorb the moisture. Sea salt seems particularly susceptible to clumping, and after all, we're only two blocks from the crashing waves of the Pacific.
But even the best sea salt won't go "stale" or "off" of course. So why so little in the shaker? Well, we use a similar amount of salt as we do of the Malabar pepper we grind, so they'll match. Not a very exciting answer, but true. As Julia would say, "Bon Appetit!"
Interested in learning more about pepper? This Wikipedia article on pepper is terrific.
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