Organic Black Pepper

Black Pepper

The pepper tree is a flowering vine in the Piperaceae family, giving us black pepper and the unripe fruits that are cooked and dried.

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

Black pepper is native to southern India and other tropical regions in Asia. Currently, Vietnam is the world's largest producer and exporter of pepper, producing 34% of the world's peppercorns (as of 2008).

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

Latin name: Piper nigrum