Spice · Organic ingredient
Black pepper
Piper nigrum
Wrinkled black peppercorns, coarsely cracked to show their pale centres. A pinch adds a lively, tingling heat that sharpens turmeric and ginger and gives chai a pleasing bite.
Blend with black pepper →The benefits
Why we love black pepper
A tingle of heat
Piperine, the natural compound that gives pepper its bite, adds a warm, tingling finish to spiced blends.
Turmeric's old companion
Pepper and turmeric have shared the pot in South Asian cooking for centuries, and the pairing works just as well in a cup.
A little goes a long way
Just a pinch is enough: more than a few per cent and pepper takes over the whole cup.
Good to know
No special cautions for most people in normal tea amounts.
Black pepper is the dried berry of a climbing vine from the Malabar Coast of Kerala in south-west India. Prized as 'black gold', it filled Roman storehouses and built medieval fortunes, and in England a 'peppercorn rent' came to mean a token payment. Today it is the most widely traded spice in the world.
Found in these tales
