Aleppo peppers grinding

2016 | No. 96

The Red Hot Aleppo Pepper

By Nancy Harmon Jenkins
Photographs by Nancy Harmon Jenkins

I’ve been to Aleppo twice and I realize now, sadly, that I will probably never again visit what was one of the most ancient and alluring cities in the entire Middle East. Admirers used to say Aleppo was the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. That may be a stretch — Damascus claims it too — but it’s darned close.

I first went back in the early 1970s in search of antiquities, but the second time, in the year 2000, I was on a quest for food, specifically for Aleppo pepper, an ingredient critical to regional flavors that has also become popular in the United States with chefs and home cooks alike. Flayflee halabiye they’re called in Aleppo, which means simply “Aleppo peppers,” using Halab, the Arabic name for Aleppo.

Aleppo peppers going to marketLike most peppers around the world, whether hot and pungent or mild and sweet, Aleppo peppers are part of the great species of Capsicum annuum, comprising almost all the domesticated Capsicums of any importance. (The exceptions are Tabasco peppers, C. frutescens, and Habaneros or Scotch bonnets, C. chinense.) The Aleppo ones are distinguished for their flavor, a combination of forward sweetness, a warm, mouth-flooding capsicum taste, a lightly tart hint of fermentation, and a somewhat delayed heat that is never overpowering. They usually rank a mere 10,000 units on the Scoville heat scale, similar to the mildness of jalapeños and a heck of a long way from Scotch bonnets, which can go to a fiery 300,000 and beyond. At home today, I use flaked Aleppo peppers on all sorts of dishes, from breakfast scrambled eggs to bean soups, and of course in many Middle Eastern preparations where they often play a significant finishing role. Apparently they’re widely available, especially on internet “gourmet” and hard-to-find-food sites. Which leads me to wonder, with the horrendous war in Syria, which has largely destroyed Aleppo, where on earth is this Aleppo pepper coming from?

When I visited the city in October 2000, I stayed, as I had done in the past, at the legendary Baron Hotel, established by an Armenian family in the early years of the last century, when Aleppo was still a fabled stop on travelers’ routes from Beirut, Baghdad, and Jerusalem north to Istanbul, and when all that vast territory was still part of the Ottoman Empire, such as it was, rapidly moldering. The Baron, too, was markedly diminished since the glory times when Agatha Christie and T. E. Lawrence were among its celebrated habitués. The hotel had become a dusty monument to faded splendor in keeping with the crumbling old town. Aleppo was Syria’s very sleepy second city, a place of great charm, delicious food, deep history, and sometimes deplorable sights — like the small boys, pale cheeks besmirched with soot, working in the slag heaps of grimy medieval workshops where they hammered out tinned copper trays and bowls that were almost as celebrated a product of Aleppo as its peppers.

Despite the oppressive Assad family regime (Bashar Assad had just taken over after his father’s death a few months before), life in Syria was remarkably peaceable. A comfortable mix of ethnic and religious groups included Sunni and Alawite Moslems, Orthodox, Catholic, and Maronite Christians, Jews, Armenians, Kurds, and a few bold Germans who had moved in to restore Aleppo’s handsome old mansions, turning them into boutique hotels and restaurants to attract foreign tourists. Syria was poor and backward but, hard as it is to believe today, most people lived together amicably if somewhat uneasily. (During my visit, I was a guest at a Greek Orthodox christening that took place in a Catholic chapel, in itself a somewhat awkward situation requiring episcopal approval from both sides. As the baby began appropriately to wail, his aunt, sitting next to me, elbowed me in the ribs and muttered darkly: “One more Christian for Syria.”)

One thing that linked all these people was food: the robust cuisine of a culturally rich region that extends from northwest Syria up into southeastern Turkey, or from Aleppo to Gaziantep and the surrounding areas. (As in other parts of the Middle East, here, too, one is quick to realize how political boundaries imposed after World War I utterly failed to reflect the realities of culture, language, and tradition.) Of course there are and were Jewish and Muslim and Greek and Armenian ways of preparing and cooking food, but one of the major characteristics in the overarching cuisine was the ubiquitous use of remarkable peppers, mostly dried and flaked but also in a thick and intensely fragrant paste. These are some of the ways that I saw and tasted and smelled in Aleppo:

In mhammara, a dense sauce that appears on almost every table as a meze dip with triangles of flatbread, a rich dark brick-red blend of ground walnuts mixed with both fresh peppers and dried ones, along with the almost equally ubiquitous pomegranate syrup, dibsl roumann;

In a refreshing salad, also served as part of a meze, of crisp, salty green olives chopped and mixed with raw vegetables, pomegranate syrup, and a healthy sprinkle of dried red peppers;

Sparking up the beany mash that is shaped into dumplings and deep-fried for falafel, a favorite street food;

As a garnish for the great Friday stew called fatteh, served in the open-air restaurants outside the labyrinthine warren of Aleppo’s souqs on the Moslem day of rest, a combination of toasted flatbread topped with a meat, bean, or vegetable stew and a dollop of yogurt — crushed Aleppo peppers and chopped fresh mint are stirred into warm olive oil or melted butter and poured over the top before it’s sent to the table;

As an essential spice in the meat mixture that tops lahm ajeen (lahmaçun in Turkish), aka Armenian pizza, little disks of dough with a topping of ground meat, peppers and pine nuts;

As a dollop of bright pepper paste, added to a humble plate of beans at the most popular and oldest bean-stew vendor in Aleppo, Abu Abdo. (“Yes, that’s Abu Abdo,” my Syrian host explained,“ pointing to the elderly man who was doling out steaming bowls of thick bean soup, called fool, to a crowd of hungry men and boys, “but his father was Abu Abdo, too, and his father before him. Perhaps they weren’t really ever Abu Abdo at all, but that’s what they’ve always been called.”

October is pepper season, when the harvest of ripe red peppers is complete and the lengthy task of drying and processing them begins, and, much as in Santa Fe in October, the whole town was filled with the sunnily seductive fragrance of drying and roasting peppers, carried on the warm autumn breeze. With all that aroma, all that tasting, I had to find the source. Walid, a genial, knowledgeable driver who spent his time in the courtyard of the Baron Hotel waiting for clients, while he buffed and polished a Poladians' house, Aleppo1952 Studebaker sedan he called Aziza, led me to Rafi Poladian, yet another Armenian among the many whose families had been in Aleppo for three or more generations, after fleeing persecution in Turkey. (Many Syrian cooks I talked with characterized spicy red peppers as an Armenian ingredient added to the local cuisine.)

The Poladians lived in Souq Astar al-Harami, in the northern part of town, in a ramshackle and alarmingly dilapidated three-story wooden compound, on the ground floor of which they made red pepper paste for half the city, it seemed. The peppers they used were long and twisted, grown, Rafi said, on farms up hidden valleys in the hills that surround the city. I described the process in my book The Essential Mediterranean:

The ripe red peppers are harvested, opened, and the core discarded, also the seeds if you want peppers that aren’t too hot. These halved peppers are laid out on rooftops and dried in the strong autumn sun until they’re somewhat less than bone dry, then brought by the sackful to the neighborhood’s market square. There a self-important and quite well-fed young man had hooked up a dangerously frayed wire that charged an ancient electric grinding machine that looked like — and might well have been — a 1930s Kitchen Aid original, once white but now stained rust by generations of red peppers fed into its maw. He proceeded to grind the peppers in the street in front of the shop, filling the air with pink dust.

Up to this point, an onlooker might be forgiven for thinking there’s no difference between this and any other ground red chile pepper, such as from Mexico and New Mexico. But the next step made all the difference and it was considerable: the coarsely ground peppers were mixed with a very little olive oil and a judicious quantity of salt and set back out on a sunny rooftop to dry a second time, during which time the color deepened and darkened. Then the thoroughly dried peppers were brought to the Aleppo more peppersPoladian workshop where they were ground again to make dibsl flayflay, or pepper paste. The oil and salt are critical in the production, whether in the paste or in the dried flakes that Rafi also sold by the hundred-grams from burlap sacks. The pleasant fragrance of fermentation, a slightly yeasty, winy aroma that is critical to the quality, comes from the salt, which, according to a US importer I spoke with at the time, helps to hold moisture and encourage that fermentation.

And now it’s all gone. Abu Abdo is gone, the Baron Hotel and its Armenian owners are gone. Aleppo’s souqs were obliterated four years ago in a horrendous conflagration, and the town itself is crumbling under the onslaught of shells, rockets, and bombs lobbed by the Syrian Army, the rebel front, Russian warplanes, and occasionally by ISIS, or Daesh, which occupies a large swath of territory northeast of Aleppo.

Compared with all that, it’s perhaps foolish and self-indulgent to mourn the loss of Aleppo pepper, a trivial thing in the great scheme, but I hope very much that Rafi Poladian and his family have managed to escape the nightmare that has descended on their town and their way of life, and that they are safe in some less fraught part of the world, and possibly still drying peppers and making pepper paste there.

And what now has become of Aleppo pepper? Despite the use of adjectives like “Aleppo style” and phrases like “characteristic of Aleppo,” the simple truth is there is no more true Aleppo pepper to be had.

A recent National Geographic blog post reported on attempts by a DC-area chef to have peppers grown from Aleppo seed, but as anyone knows who has ever grown peppers, no matter what kind, they are not reliable botanically and freely interbreed. In our American impatience to snatch up the fruits of the earth and bring them home to an audience of voracious gourmands, it’s important to understand that a plant, a tree, a vine is not just the result of information contained in the seed, powerful as that information may be. So much of the ultimate quality depends on climate and cultivation, not to mention processing techniques and other variables. I’ve taken seeds from Espelette peppers, from the Basque region on the border between France and Spain, for instance, and grown them in similar dry, mountainous, thin-soiled areas of Tuscany only to have them morph from their delightfully warm originals to something searingly hot and Tuscan. Just so, you can take seeds of the cultivar peculiar to Aleppo (assuming you can find them) and plant them in California or New Mexico or suburban Virginia, and what will come up might or might not be delicious but it will definitely not be an Aleppo pepper. This kind of distinction is what Europeans try to recognize and control with their Protected Denominations of Origin. (That same Espelette pepper, Piment d’Espelette, has one.)

So, regretfully, I yield up the whole concept of Aleppo peppers. Fortunately, there is a more than acceptable alternative. I said earlier that Aleppo represents the southern end of a culinary zone that stretches up into Turkey, and due north from Aleppo by 122 kilometers (about 73 miles) is the Turkish city of Gaziantep, equally famous in the region for the quality of its peppers. (And its food in general: Ask a Turk where the best food in Turkey is. First, he will say, at my mother’s table, and then, in Gaziantep.) There red chili peppers are treated in a similar manner to those of Aleppo and while the good cooks of Aleppo might scorn the Antep peppers (so-called from the old name of the town) from Gaziantep, the folks from Gaziantep, when I’ve asked them about Aleppo peppers, looked thoroughly bewildered: “Why would anyone care about those?” they wanted to know.

I believe that most of the Aleppo pepper available in US markets today is actually Antep pepper, but I haven’t been able to confirm this. Several importers would say only, “Yes, I have to get it from Turkey now. But it’s the same.” Presumably Antep.

Two more Turkish peppers worth knowing are slightly, but tellingly, different in flavor from Aleppo or Antep peppers. Urfa peppers (Urfa biber in Turkish) come from the town of Şanliurfa east of Gaziantep, and Maraş peppers (Maraş biber) come from Kahramanmaraş to the west. All three towns are in southern Turkey, the pepper heartland. The Urfa peppers are especially interesting since they are processed differently. As a Turkish friend, Tuba Şatana, described it to me when we were walking through a market in Istanbul: Urfa pepper, also called isot, is fermented longer. Tuba explained: the peppers are sun-dried for a couple of days, then put in big plastic bags to sweat in the sun. The bags are changed every day, and the peppers gradually take on a deep purple-black color; when dry they are pounded into flakes. This alternate sweating and drying produces a decidedly fermented flavor, winy and fruity, that, along with the darker color, distinguishes Urfa peppers from all others. Maraş peppers, on the other hand, are more like the Aleppo peppers of my memory, with their bright, sunny flavor, just a hint of fermentation, and a decided taste of capsicum.

Antep peppers are not easy to find, not under that name (although most of the so-called Aleppo peppers in commerce may in fact come from Gaziantep), but Maraş and Urfa are sold at a number of trustworthy outlets. Either or all — Antep, Maraş, or Urfa — these are powerfully fragrant, yet not overpoweringly hot, condiments, capable of adding a special tone to any dish, and very different from the Mexican or Asian peppers we are used to. I suggest trying them first in something as simple as a good sprinkle on top of breakfast (or anytime) eggs, whether scrambled or fried. Then go on to a hearty soup of cannellini or other beans, melting a couple of tablespoons of butter in a pan, then stirring in a tablespoon of crushed chile flakes, swirling it off the heat, which might burn the pepper flakes, and pouring it atop a bowl of soup just before sending it to table. You will soon find yourself looking for other ways to add them to your repertoire. ●

Here are a few US suppliers of Maraş and Urfa Turkish peppers. They also offer “Aleppo” pepper, but you should understand that it is not really from Aleppo:

Kalustyan’s, New York City, tel 800.352.3451, (Maraş, Urfa, and “Aleppo”)

Formaggio Kitchen, Cambridge, Massachusetts, tel 888.212.3224, (Maraş, Urfa, and “Aleppo”)

Sahadi’s in Brooklyn, New York, tel 718.624.4550, (Urfa and “Aleppo”)

From issue 96

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