Zingerman's Five Star Black Pepper Blend

In my book The Guide to Good Leading, I write about our definition of local food. It is less about geography and mostly about having a positive relationship with those from whom we buy, and to those we sell. Since black peppercorns don’t grow in Michigan, that means we buy it from someone with whom we can have a long-lasting connection and conversation.

Someone like the de Vienne family.

They run Montreal’s Épices de Cru, and they’ve given us the opportunity for connection and conversation in spades over the last several years. Spices generally arrive at most business’s doors from distributors. There is no connection to the farmers who grow them or the people who go out into the wild to gather them. Now we have access to real people and real communities with whom we can communicate on almost every spice front. By switching over our pepper purchase, not only are we raising the quality of what we’re buying and improving the flavor of nearly all our food, but we now have begun a direct connection with the folks in India whose diligent work has made all this possible!

That connection is named Sudheer.

Sudheer has made it his life’s mission to master the pepper trade. His story started with his grandmother, who was a supervisor for a cardamom plantation. As a kid, he would visit his grandmother and wander between the rows of cardamom and pepper. Today he’s a spice sourcer in Kerala, down at the bottom of the Indian subcontinent along the west coast. It’s long been known as the “spice garden of India.” It’s also a beautiful region, one that draws many tourists each year. Unlike many agricultural products in the modern world, pepper in Kerala is grown still on a very small scale. “The small farmers here, they have one or two hectares,” Sudheer told me. Of equal importance, Sudheer has a direct relationship with each farmer. “We never buy through traders,” he told me. “Only directly from the farmer.”

That was the old the way the old time spice traders did it centuries ago. Back then spice trading was mostly about extracting as much from the producing regions in Asia and making as much money as possible in the process. That old model was, as many historians have described, mostly a violent and horrible way to work in which farmers and growers suffered and Europeans traders became wealthy.

Sudheer’s approach is the opposite. To raise people up and share the wealth, rather than taking it all half-way around the world. It’s all about working with the farmers to help get them to grow higher quality, paying them more for it, and in the process, making the lives of everyone involved better. Since most people in the world know only “black pepper” as if it were a singular entity, Sudheer is determined to teach people the differences between one black pepper and the next. He explains, “My place is a wildlife sanctuary. If you drive 30 or 40 kilometers from a farm, the pepper will taste totally different.”

From farmer to table: developing a Zingerman’s exclusive pepper blend.

Sudheer and the team at Épices de Cru spent months testing different combinations before settling on three finalists which they brought us to taste. Then we spent three more weeks grinding, cracking, smelling and tasting here before settling on this fantastic blend of five black peppers. All five come from southwest India, the pepper capital of the world.

In a world seasoned with anonymous large-scale production peppers, this blend of whole peppercorns is something special and we’re working to put it to use throughout our organization—even in some of our breads. It’s on my table at home. I hope it will soon be on your table too!

“We travel the world looking for whole spices, authentic recipes and traditional spice blends. That’s really our mantra,” Marika de Vienne told me recently about her family’s spice business, Epices de Cru. “We go to different countries and start in the markets. We look at what everyday people are eating. Cultural gastronomy often happens through restaurants. But we look at what people are cooking at home.”

When I had the pleasure of visiting the Epices de Cru shop in Montreal, it was an amazing, multi-sensory experience. The staff was engaged. The energy was excellent. The aromas were amazing. Everyone was talking spices, smelling spices, sharing stories of what one could cook with them; people were smiling, laughing but still taking their food very seriously.

Perhaps most exciting of all, was listening to the staff tell the story of where each spice came from, the region, the town, often the family that grew it.

“We know many of the growers personally,” Marika explained. “We buy directly from growers, local traditional traders, coops, and then we have trained, trusted, local agents to do the buying for us in some places. We select them all personally and we have NEVER, ever bought from brokers. Our vision is that one day we can pinpoint where all our spices are sourced.”

When customers asked a question, staffers would open a tin or jar so that their client could smell the spices. But they didn’t stop there—they would scoop a bit of whatever it was the customer was curious about into a mortar and pestle and grind it up right then and there. Which means that customers were experiencing the spices in their full potency—just ground, when all their essential and volatile oils were at their highest.

What about already ground spices?

When I asked if they sell any ground spices, Marika exclaimed, “No! It’s against our mission. A lot of ground spices are cut with flour, powdered brick, or ground up rice, etc. We want people to see what we haven’t really altered the product in any way. Spices are delicate things. As soon as you grind them the flavor will fly away. If we ground them they would only last 6 months, even in our containers which protect the spices from light and humidity. Because we’re buying really special crops we want them to be able to last as long as possible. What’s the point of traveling across the planet and then grinding it up and letting all those valuable oils get lost. It just seems like a crime.”

If you’re worried about grinding this at home let me assure you that there’s really nothing difficult about it in the least. The hardest thing is getting a mortar and pestle if you don’t have one. Marika recommends using a marble one. All you do is drop the seed into the mortar and do some quick wrist work with the pestle—it takes less than sixty seconds. The aroma will come up almost immediately when you start grinding. It really couldn’t be easier.

Red peppers, often called chiles or chilli peppers, are the fruits of small shrubs native to South America. They belong to the botanical genus Capsicum. Black peppercorns are dried berries that grow on vines. They’re native to southwest India and belong to the genus Piper. They are completely unrelated plants from opposite sides of the globe. How did they wind up with the same name?

Blame it on Spanish explorers. When they first tasted chilli (the Nahuatl word for capsicums), they associated the fiery pungency with the familiar piquancy of black pepper. Rather than use the local name or create an entirely new name, they called capsicums by their word for black pepper—pimiento.
When the name got translated into English, it stuck.

Unlike black pepper, which grows only in the tropics, red pepper can grow in temperate climates. That has made it one of the most widely used spices in cuisines around the world, from Mexico to Tunisia, Vietnam to Hungary.