Name: The power of pepper ⏲️ 6 Minute English
Uploaded: 2026-02-26T21:31:14.000Z
Duration: 6 min 16 s
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Six Minute English from BBCLearningEnglish.com hello, this is Six Minute English from BBC Learning English.

In this episode, we're discussing a food seasoning that's so popular.

We eat around three quarters of a million tons of it a year.

I think it's an easy way to add some spice.

Given its popularity, it's surprising that most people know very little about pepper.

Did you know, for example, that peppers are the fruit of vines often growing over 10 meters high?

Our ancestors would be surprised how little we know.

From ancient Greece onwards, pepper was prized as the black gold of ingredients.

And explorers cross oceans in search of it, des discovering new continents along the way.

In this episode, we'll get reacquainted with pepper and learn some useful new words and phrases too.

And remember, you'll find a transcript for you to read along with us as you listen on our website, bbclearningenglish.com okay, first, I have a question for you.

Although it's black pepper you're most likely to see in shops and restaurants in the uk, there are hundreds of different varieties worldwide.

Does it A make people cry, B tastes like Parmesan cheese, or C costs more than gold?

Well, I don't think it would be as expensive as gold and I kind of want it to taste like Parmesan cheese.

Ok, well, we'll find out later in the program.

Mathilde Rollinger is the daughter of Olivier Rollinger, an award winning French chef famous for his use of spices.

While other little girls of her age were sprinkling sugar on their breakfast yogurt, Mathilde was the only girl in Paris sprinkling pepper.

Today, Mathilde runs the Epice Rollinger spice shop in the Opera area of the city.

Here customers can find a huge range of peppers, from fruity red Cambodian Kampot pepper to Borneo's Sarawak black pepper.

With its woody aroma, these peppers have strong, distinctive tastes.

But curiously, they enhance rather than overpower the flavour of the food you're eating.

As Mathilde explained to BBC World Service programme the Food Chain, it will give a kick and transform it, but

you will still have the savor of the different ingredients.

It will not disguise the other ingredient, but it will push them.

A flavor catalyst we can say in punctuation like it's an exclamation.

To give something a kick means to provide it with extra stimulation or excitement.

Mathilde calls it a catalyst, something that causes another action to start or makes it happen more quickly.

In fact, she says pepper is like an exclamation mark.

Saying something is like an exclamation mark means it shows strong emotion or excitement, the same thing an exclamation mark does in written punctuation.

Mathilde's spice shop holds pepper tasting sessions where she explains to customers the origin of her peppers and how they grow, changing color as they harden in the sun.

Reporter John Laurenson attended one of these tasting sessions for BBC World Service program Food Chain.

The different colours of pepper, though, as Mathilde started to say, do not correspond to the different varieties, but

to the maturity of the peppercorns and what people do to them.

They're green when they're young, black when they're mature and dried red when they're very mature.

Grey pepper is an industrial creation, not a botanical one ground to a fine powder.

The color of pepper is not determined by the variety but by its maturity.

A food's maturity describes the stage when a food is fully grown and ready to harvest.

For peppers, this is when they wrinkle and go black.

Often a pepper mill is used to grind pepper, to crush it into powder by pressing it between two hard surfaces.

This happens with grey pepper, an artificially produced pepper mix, which Mathilde is not keen on, meaning she doesn't like it.

I'll look at it differently the next time I sprinkle some on my food.

Ok, Neil, I think it's time to reveal the answer to your question.

I asked you what's unusual about Phu Quoc, a white pepper from Vietnam.

I answered B, because I want it to taste like Parmesan cheese.

Well, you're lucky, because it is, in fact, B, it tastes like Parmesan cheese.

Ok, let's recap the vocabulary we've learned, starting with the phrase give something a kick, meaning to add extra thrill or excitement.

A catalyst causes something to start or speeds it up.

If you say something is like an exclamation mark, you mean it signifies strong emotion, surprise or excitement, just like an exclamation mark does in writing.

A food's maturity refers to the stage when it's fully grown and ready for harvest.

To grind food means to crush it into powder by being pressed between two hard surfaces.

And finally, if you're keen on something, you like it and enjoy doing it.

But remember, you can find worksheets, quizzes and loads more resources to improve your English on our website, bbclearningenglish.com see you there soon.

Six minute English from BBCLearningEnglish.com.