Spice up your life with fresh French chillies

When we first moved to France, I tried to buy fresh chillies locally and found that the only ones available were a variety called doux des Landes. They look very like cayenne pepper but are so mild that they taste like a poivron, or bell pepper, rather than a piment, or chilli.

Try them in your chilli con carne and you will be disappointed. Doux des Landes is used in the spicy French dish piperade, but the heat is provided by another well-known French chilli: piment d’Espelette.

Chillies were first brought to Spain by the conquistadors. Their popularity spread throughout Portugal but, in France, their cultivation became particularly established in the Basque country.

Chilli production in the French Basque countryside centred around the small mountain town of Espelette, where each autumn the harvest is celebrated with a festival and the façades of houses are decorated with strings of long red chillies.

Espelette chillies are eaten fresh, dried and ground into a distinctive powder that is readily available throughout France. If you want fresh chillies for cooking, rather than powdered piment d’Espelette, however, it can be a challenge. Specialist shops sell fresh chillies, but most shops and rural markets offer only a limited number of varieties.

Similarly, if you decide to grow your own, your local nursery will probably have only doux des Landes and, possibly, cayenne and jalapeño plants for sale.

This year, I found Gorria chillies at our weekly village market. This is the variety grown in Espelette. I planted them in our potager once the risk of frost had passed and had chillies developing by the end of June.

For more unusual varieties, we source seeds from within the EU and grow them from scratch, which means sowing in a heated propagator in early February. I use French suppliers such as Kokopelli. Visit its website and search for ‘piment’ and you will find a cornucopia of shapes, colours, sizes and, of course, levels of heat.

This year, I am growing jalapeño and Gorria, which I bought as young plants. We started picking in August. We also planted Padrón peppers (a variety of chilli, botanically speaking) and Hungarian hot wax, which I bought as seeds, sowed in February and planted out once the risk of frost had passed. We grow only one plant of each variety, freezing most of the crop for use throughout the year.

The recent hot summers have benefited our chillies enormously, making them earlier, more bountiful and hotter. Heat is produced by a group of compounds called capsaicinoids. When a chilli plant is under stress, including from heat or drought, the level of these compounds can increase, making the chillies hotter.

This year, our normally mild-mannered Padrón peppers might well turn out to have a bit more of a kick than usual.

A taste for hotter food has grown in France in recent decades. A chilli known as piment de Bresse is grown in eastern France. This relative of the Espelette has been popular in local cooking since the 1950s, including in poulet de Bresse.

Near Marseille, Maison Martin has been producing spicy sauces using locally grown chillies since 2019, including a sauce called La Marseillaise.