Mountain Pepper
Tasmannia lanceolata
Not pepper. Not related to pepper. The name is borrowed and the comparison sells it short.
The heat arrives late. You taste the berry first — fruity, almost sweet, deeply purple, stains everything it touches — and then several seconds later the heat builds and spreads, closer to a numbing warmth than the sharp hit of a peppercorn. It rewards a light hand. Too much and it takes over the dish.
Used dried and ground in rubs and cured meats, in sauces, in gin, and against chocolate and dark fruit in desserts. The leaf is milder than the berry and does a different job.
The plants are either male or female, and only the females fruit — which is one of several things that make this a harder crop than it looks.
We planted ours two years ago and more than half of them died. We think it was the sun. Mountain pepper grows wild as an understorey plant in cool Tasmanian and alpine forest, under a canopy, and we put it into open paddock in central Victoria. We moved the survivors into four rows and built a shadecloth roof over them. We're waiting to see whether they thrive under it before we plant any more.
If they do, this is the crop we think has the most ahead of it.
Get in touch if you'd like to know how they go.