Blistered Padrón Peppers
Small green peppers blistered until the skins go slack and freckled, salted hot — and roughly one in ten will be fierce.
Why it works
Padróns are picked young and mild, but the odd one hangs on the plant a week too long and comes in hot; that lottery, about one pepper in ten, is the charm of the plate. A hard dry heat blisters the thin skins before the flesh has time to collapse, so they stay taut and sweet inside rather than steaming to pulp, and salting them the second they come out means the flakes stick to the hot oil instead of sliding off.
Method
- Heat the air fryer to 200°C (400°F). Dry the peppers well on a tea towel — wet skins steam rather than blister — and turn them in a bowl with the oil until they gleam.
- Tip them into the basket in a loose single layer and air fry for 6 minutes, shaking hard at 3 minutes and again at 5. Run them while the main sits under foil; they want to reach the table straight from the basket.
- They are ready when the skins are slack and blistered dark in patches, the flesh has slumped a little and one or two have split. Pale, tight peppers need another minute.
- Tip onto a warm plate and scatter flaky salt over them from a height while they still steam. Nothing else goes on — no lemon, no vinegar. Eat them with your fingers, holding the stalk.
For the toddler
There is no telling which pepper is the hot one, so do not gamble on their behalf. Put a few batons of sweet red pepper or courgette into the basket alongside on the same timer and give them those instead, quartered lengthways and cut to finger lengths. Lift their pieces out before the salt goes anywhere near the plate. A quarter of an adult serving.
How the toddler notes workChef’s notes
Turkish sivri or Japanese shishito peppers behave the same way on the same timer, with the same occasional heat.
There is no prep beyond drying them. Cook them first, salt them as the main comes off the heat.
Grilled prawns, chorizo and potatoes, or a thick tortilla — one of several small plates rather than a lone vegetable.
Rare, but they keep a day chilled. Chop them through scrambled eggs, or fold them cold into a potato salad.