The Roasted Red Pepper

You'll find several recipes that involve roasted red peppers on this site, but their use is certainly not limited to the recipes that explicitly call for them.  They add a ton of flavor to a wide variety of foods.  Bell peppers get sweeter as they ripen, until they spoil.  Red peppers are more ripe than their green counterparts, thus sweeter.  However, when you roast red peppers, they tend to get even sweeter!

Making Roasted Red Peppers

Well, you can buy roasted red peppers in a supermarket, but personally, I like to make my own. Since roasting your own peppers can be a time consuming process (the roasting part) depending on the method used, you can roast a lot of them at once and store them for later usage.

Making them is pretty easy:

1. Preheat a broiler.  You can do this in a toaster oven that has a broiler feature.
2. Slice each large red bell pepper into fourths, lengthwise.  Use as many slices as you can fit onto the broiler pan.
   
3. Remove seeds and membranes.
4. Place peppers, skin side up, on the broiler pan.
5. Place in broiler until skin blackens and bubbles up, checking every 10 minutes.
6. Remove peppers and allow to cool for a few minutes.
7. Use fingers and/or a knife to remove blackened skins to reveal flesh underneath.

You can also do this with a grill, grilling skin side down.  This may be a bit faster than broiling, but sometimes a broiler is a just a bit more convenient.  If you are going to use a grill, you may want to brush it with olive oil to prevent sticking. Ok, so using a grill technically isn't roasting, but the end result is nearly the same.

Note: Smaller pepper slices will blacken faster. However, if you slice them too thin, you'll be mostly left with a charred mess and a lot of wasted pepper.

Uses

Once you've got your peppers roasted, you can:

1. Slice them and put them on salads or sandwiches
   
2. Mince them and make them part of a stuffing for stuffed chicken or fish.
3. Puree them and make them into a sauce.
4. Mince and mix into a sauce.
5. Dry them out and grind them into a seasoning.

The possibilities are (almost) endless.  Experimenting with this can yield some very tasty results.