Eat your heart out, Peter Piper

Name all the peppers you can buy and you really will get a tongue-twister. Mark Hix picks some of the best recipes.

Peperonata, piperade and peperoncini all roll off the tongue in the style of Pavarotti. They're all related to each other, though perhaps not to the tongue-twisting pickled pepper that Peter Piper picked. What these dishes have in common is the fleshy peppers that are imported from all over the world, all year round. The ones we see mainly come from Holland in regular shapes and sizes, unlike those in colourful heaps on roadside stalls all over the Mediterranean.

Some of the more unusual of the many varieties of pepper also turn up here, sometimes unexpectedly. I first came across the long red peppers ­ ramero ­ a few years ago in a supermarket in Stockport. They were amazing-looking, like giant chillies. I grabbed some and served them for dinner. I grilled them with the skins on, crumbled some feta and dotted capers and black olives over them. Simple as that.

Sometimes supermarkets are quicker at getting hold of new products than my suppliers, and it took some time for my greengrocer to source them. Now these ramero peppers are plentiful in Covent Garden wholesale market and regularly appear on my restaurant menus in various guises.

Mark Edwards, the chef at Nobu, serves a tiny variety of pepper called padron as a starter. They're tossed in the wok for a few seconds then sprinkled with sea salt.

My supplier, Booths in Borough Market in Bermondsey (020-7378 8666) stocks them, and the padron peppers may have started to turn up in supermarkets. If you find some, beware: one in 10 are hot. You'll have to decide if the gamble's worth taking. I was cooking dinner for some friends ­ they invite me round and I always end up in the kitchen ­ and served some padron with drinks. Needless to say, the most glamorous woman in the room got the hot one. Perhaps I was a bit too quick to leap to the rescue with the water; for some reason it didn't seem much appreciated.

But so often peppers don't cause that much excitement. They're used for nothing more imaginative than slicing into a salad, leaving the remaining half left in the fridge for weeks until it goes mouldy and ends up in the bin. Cooking peppers releases the flavours and produces a completely different and delicious sweetness. The taste of raw peppers can stay with you for some time as a gentle reminder that perhaps you should have cooked them. Here, then are some ways to do it.