Calabrian-style sweet peppers with potatoes
Pipi e patati
This is how the name of this dish sounds in the Calabrian dialect, where it originally comes from.
In Italian, it is pronounced slightly differently: “Peperoni e patate alla calabrese.”
Calabria is located in the “toe” of the Italian boot and is a southern agricultural region of Italy.
Sweet peppers with potatoes have been prepared in Calabria since ancient times. The finished dish keeps very well even without refrigeration. For this reason, farmers used to prepare it, wrap it in bread, and take it with them early in the morning to eat it later in the fields or pastures.
The main distinctive feature of this dish is that the onion is not added at the beginning of cooking, as we are used to, but at the very end. And no spices are added at all—only the pure taste of good olive oil, sweet peppers, potatoes, and red onion.
Peperoni e patate alla calabrese can be served as a side dish with meat or fish, or enjoyed on its own during hot summer days.
Peperoni e patate alla calabrese
Ingredients
- 3 unit sweet peppers yellow and red
- 2 red onions
- 2 potatoes
- salt
- olive oil
- black pepper
Instructions
- All vegetables should be cut into roughly the same shape—wedges or strips.Peel the potatoes, rinse them under running water, cut them into wedges, and place them in a pan with hot olive oil (photo 1). Let the potatoes fry lightly.
- Meanwhile, wash the sweet peppers, remove the stems and seeds, and cut away the white inner parts. Slice the peppers into strips about 1 cm thick (photo 2). Add them to the pan with the potatoes (photo 3). Stir, cover with a lid, and cook for about 20 minutes.
- Peel the red onion and slice it lengthwise (photo 4). Add it about 15 minutes before the dish is fully cooked (photo 5).Season with salt only at the very end of cooking. Serve hot (photo 6).
