How to super-charge your home cooking
Top 10 tips to make your home-made meals restaurant-worthy with just one key ingredient:
White Kampot Pepper
1. Boost your cheese
On the days when you are a little lazy or are running in between zoom meetings and don’t have time to cook a full meal, you can still treat yourself with a nice cheese board, sourdough bread and maybe some gherkins. The best way to elevate this meal to a foodie experience is to sprinkle your cheese with White Kampot pepper. You'll taste the cheese for much, much longer than usual, because its zesty, nutty flavours combine with an underlying heat that just keeps going, adding vibrancy and clarity to delicate food flavours. One of our favourite ways to enjoy white pepper is to simply get some good gruyere and grind the white pepper on top. Delicious!
2. Bake bread like no one else
In bread baking, slightly reduce the salt in your dough mix and add a teaspoon of finely ground white pepper: it lifts ALL the flavours.
3. Elevate your salt but not your blood pressure
An overall tip that will change the amount of salt you use (we know, we always tend to put too much because it’s so delicious!): mix white pepper with salt when cooking, instead of using just salt. It blends perfectly into most recipes and is a main staple in any restaurant chef's spice rack. White pepper brings the flavour of food from the front of your palate to the back, giving the food a more full-body taste, meaning you don’t need to use as much salt to make a flavoursome meal.
4. Master Asian soups
Ever wondered why you were never able to get quite the same flavours of that ramen place around the corner? By now you can guess what the answer is: white pepper. Typically, Asian recipes have a lot of subtle flavours and because the white pepper seasons without affecting the delicate balance and layers of these flavours, it is your best ally when attempting any Asian curries, soups, noodle dishes, or the ever-so-elusive perfect ramen.
5. Bring on the white sauces
We know what you think: I’m not a Parisian chef and there’s no way I can pull this off. Well, think again. You can delve into white sauces with confidence when you have white pepper on your side.
You can use it in all of the following classic white sauces to surprise yourself and your family with your refined cooking skills:
Béchamel sauce: for a (veggie or meat) lasagne to die for
Caruso sauce: make this easy, yet delicious, pasta dish with cream, cheese and mushrooms
Mornay sauce: the best mac and cheese you’ll ever make!
Mushroom sauce
And all the traditional French sauces: Sauce Allemande, Sauce Américaine, Suprême sauce, Velouté sauce.
6. Make the perfect vinaigrette
Vinaigrettes: are they ever exciting? Well, they can be. You can be playful and experiment with many ingredients, but even if you stick to the most basic one- oil, vinegar, lemon juice, salt and pepper- you can still make it extraordinary by using white Kampot pepper.
7. Roll out the carpet- ahem- pastry for tartes and quiches
Whether you make the pastry yourself (congrats!) or just roll out the shop-bought puff pastry, you can exercise your creativity with all sorts of tasty savoury tartes and quiches. No matter which filling you choose (but really, you get some cheese or white sauce in there!), you can use white Kampot pepper to make it pop. This week we (the Botree family in Scotland) made a caramelised onion potato and goats cheese tart with puff pastry. We used white pepper, fleur de sel, garlic and thyme to season. And it was a.w.e.s.o.m.e. Contact us on Instagram if you’d like the recipe!
Also, we recommend you try to add white pepper to Spanakopita: a Greek tart typically with spinach and feta cheese filling, with a rocket and red onion salad.
8. Posh up the humble chicken soup
Spring is coming, but let’s be honest, there’s nothing more comforting than chicken soup when you are stuck at home. Use white pepper in your chicken soup or try avgolemono (Greek chicken, lemon and egg soup) to taste all the flavours. If you prefer more sophisticated soups to warm your heart, no worries: white pepper is the perfect accent for vichyssoise. And if you are vegetarian, it is incredible in onion soups (and pureed cauliflowers).
9. Enhance marinades and meats
You think of BBQ and go straight to black pepper. Sure, but expand your horizons and consider pre-seasoning: you can use white pepper as a pre-seasoner for marinades. And not everything happens just on the grill: when browning meat, you can use white Kampot pepper to make the most of these two often neglected steps in meat cooking.
10. Healthier all around
White pepper has all of the piperine found in pepper, so the health benefits are more magnified with white over black. If you add to turmeric to it, it becomes a superfood, as the piperine inhibits the metabolic breakdown of turmeric compounds in the gut and the liver. This allows higher levels of turmeric compounds to remain in the body increasing its bioavailability.
Extra tip
One last thing: white pepper is also wonderful on all white fish, and makes any flour, batter or bread mix just superb.
Why Botree White Kampot pepper?
White Pepper is usually the seed inside your normal black pepper, but Botree white Kampot pepper is the seed from our late harvest red pepper, so it's the most mature white pepper on the market. Larger, more flavoursome and more impactful on dishes.
It has also won a Great Taste Award, and the judges said: “These have a very fragrant and charming introductory note on the front of the tongue...The heat does indeed settle at the back of the palate, where it provides a long- lasting glow.”
