Eating Peppers Temporarily Mothballed

Two weeks ago I was shopping at Fairway. I needed red peppers for a recipe I was making that night, but Fairway didn't have any. Hmm, well I was off to Court Street to pick up something else, so I stopped into the Italian grocery and they had this incredible deal on just the kind of pepper I was looking for. If you can believe it, I bought the last two pound bag of long red peppers for $3.99! Almost too good of a deal for me to trust, but then I needed the peppers.

When I began to prepare the meal I tasted the fresh peppers and I thought there was an odd flavor to them, definitely not pepper, although they were highly sweet as the label said they would be. I kept coming up with manure, but the wrong kind of manure. Yet that never satisfied me, what was that flavor?

Two weeks later I decided to use the rest of these peppers. Boy, they sure held up well in the fridge. I chopped one and tasted the bottom tip. Bang! Mothballs! That is the flavor, however much milder than the mothball-flavored candy my grandmother used to have around the house. But truly, mothball-flavored peppers. OK, not going to use those, but I did google just that. I came up with very little, except a vegan blog post from 2007 where the author mentions the very same phenomenon. A modest number of commenters who googled the same found that site and posted their experience.

There appears to be a Canada connection. Ok, out-of-season red peppers, mothballs, Canada. It's funny enough to mention that I took the above photo to post about what a great deal I got on these peppers in Brooklyn and what it ends up doing is illustrating how these incredibly cheap peppers from Nicaragua via Canada taste a hell of a lot like mothballs - naphthalene or 1,4-dichlorobenzene (guys, you know this one -urinal biscuits).

I contacted Sunset and I will let you know what, if anything, they have to say about it.