Foods & cuts · Chilli pepper
Padrón peppers
Small, thin-walled and eaten whole by the stalk after a minute or two over a hard fire. The one where the point is blistered skin and nothing else.
What it is
- Form
- Whole vegetable
- Typical weight
- 5–12 g
- Typical thickness
- 12–20 mm
- Cut
- Not a cut of anything
Why it behaves as it does
About as fast as anything in the catalogue. A Padrón weighs under ten grams with walls a couple of millimetres thick, so there is essentially nothing to heat through — the cook is entirely surface, and it is finished when the skin has blistered and collapsed. Longer produces something limp rather than something better. They are far too small for a grate and belong in a basket or a pan over the fire. The famous unpredictability of their heat is a genuine feature of the cultivar rather than of cooking, and grilling does not change it. Shishito is recorded as an approximate alias rather than a synonym: a comparable Japanese pepper cooked the same way, not the same cultivar.
When is it done?
Food-safety endpoint
BBQHQ holds no food-safety rule for this food. We are not showing you another jurisdiction’s figure in its place — check your national food-safety authority.
When it goes wrong
- It fell through the grate
- Vegetables falling through the grate — 2 distinguishable causes.
Afterwards
Cooling, keeping and reheating what is left is general guidance for barbecue leftovers. Neither UK authority publishes anything specific to padrón peppers, and BBQHQ does not invent a distinction they do not make.
What we don't know about this
No published barbecue cooking time has been found for this food. The sources that cover it describe how to prepare it or how to keep it safe, not how long it takes over fire.
What we know we’re missing records what was searched for each of these, and what would settle it.