Pepper White Organic

White Peppercorns

The pepper tree is a flowering tree in the Piperaceae family that provides us with white pepper, which are the mature and fully-grown stripped fruits.

The pepper tree is cultivated for its fruit, which is usually dried and used as a spice. The fruit, known as a peppercorn when dried, is about 5 millimeters in diameter, dark red when fully ripe, and like all drupes, it contains a single seed. These are what we refer to as peppercorns or simply as pepper, or more precisely as black pepper (cooked and dried unripe fruits), green pepper (dried unripe fruits), or white pepper (mature fruit seeds).

White pepper most often comes from Sri Lanka, but also other places in the tropical areas of Asia. Currently, Vietnam is the world's largest producer and exporter of pepper, producing 34% of the world's peppercorns (data from 2008).

Dried pepper has been used since ancient times for both its flavor and as a traditional medicine. Black pepper is the world's most traded spice. It is one of the most common spices in European cuisine. The strong spicy flavor in black pepper is due to the chemical compound piperine.

Latin name: Piper nigrum