Cooking with Crosby Roamann: Sweet "Hungarian" Paprika

 

It was one of those special days of the year when, over the weekend, Juliana and I harvested a grocery bag's worth of bright red Hungarian-bred sweet red peppers and brought them home to process. The process is relatively easy. We wash and dry the peppers, and then cut them lengthwise by hand and remove most of the ribs and seeds. Next we lay them out on a large rimmed baking sheet lined with parchment pepper. Then we dry them in the oven at the lowest temperature we can get, which in our oven is only 200F (a lower temperature of 140 would be ideal, but it would take longer ... much, much, much longer). The drying process at 200F takes about 5-6 hours, after which we let the dried peppers cool over night. In the morning, we crush them by hand, and process them into a fine powder in our spice grinder (from Cuisinart). Lastly, storage! We keep our sweet "Hungarian" paprika in an air-tight container in the fridge, in which condition it will last all year long, and often longer.

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Next recipe coming up -- Chicken Paprikas.

 

 

 

 

Vineyard updates:

Things are moving fast these days at the vineyard. The reds are nearing completion of veraison, the Sauvignon Blanc is sugaring up, olives are fleshing out, and the roses are in bloom. Trino and I have been going through the vineyard daily to drop green fruit from the Cabernets and the Merlot, space out the clusters, do a little final leaf pulling on some of the more overgrown vines -- generally just trying to clean things up as much as possible. The weather has been consistent, warm, without any significant wind.

Vineyard updates: Veraison underway in the Merlot

"Wow!" It's the only word to describe the pace of ripening this year. After a seemingly endless string of warm weather throughout July, veraison has started earlier than I think in any year since we started making wine in 2007. The Merlot is already about 40% colored, perhaps more or less in some blocks, with the strongest vines leading the way. It's going to be an exciting harvest!

Vineyard updates & vegetable boxes, peppers, tomatoes

We installed three large vegetable boxes near our well in the vineyard this year and planted tomatoes and two kinds of peppers, both generally popular in traditional Hungarian cuisine -- sweet paprila peppers (for paprikas) and gypsy peppers, a brilliantly neon green small pepper that can be eaten with dips, stuffed, or used as an accompaniment for paprikash. So far everything has been thriving and we're looking forward to a September harvest for most of the veggies.

Tomatoes and peppers gone wild in the vegetable boxes --

Sugar accumulation has already begun in the Sauvignon Blanc, pictured below. By contrast, the Sauvignon Blanc fruit has set with nicely spaced clusters, and not as much of the bunching as in the Merlot pictured above.

Sauvignon Blanc continued -- pictured here -- Musque clone planted in 1999. This is one of our rare cordon-pruned vines, which generally occupy the end rows in the Sauvignon Blanc block 4.