Spicefreak

Hey folks, it’s tuesday again and, today, I feel like trying something new. A different kind of product than anything that I’ve brought you before:

These are Chilli Bobs’ pickled onions, made with chilli and pink peppercorns. And labelled in pink and purple, to match.

Their kilner jar, alone, is quite distinctive. Yet so, too, is the pepper and I’ve previously found that those little pink peppercorns pair wonderfully with spicy food. Though I’d never have thought of using them in a setting like this.

Chilli Bobs’ pickled onions are an extremely creative product and there’s still at least one more surprise, hidden within. So let’s have a look, shall we?

Popping open the jar, this is what’s inside and I can’t say that it’s what I expected:

I mean, does this look like an onion to you, dear readers? Because it sure doesn’t to me.

No, I’ve talked to the producer and what we have here is apparently a banana shallot. Very much still in the allium family but also very much its own thing. With a different shape, taste and even colouration than your standard onion.

Though, of course, we don’t see the large, pink, label-matching blotches, once they’ve been soaked in vinegar.

What we do see, however, if we take a little step back, are the chillies:

A mix of finger and bird’s eye varieties, nested inside of each other, which aren’t clarified in the ingredients list. Though I’m pretty sure that one’s either a cayenne or a de arbol, while the other is a piri piri or pequin. They’re both too strongly pickled for me to say which, with certainty, but their woodier notes imply the pequin and de arbol, to me.

Likewise, there is no mention of what type of vinegar they are pickled in and the lack of “sulphites”, as an allergen, strongly implies that it’s not the malt vinegar that it looks like. Before I even get to how much fruitier it tastes. I still strongly suspect that there’s the usual, chip shop, fake malt in the mix, given its dark, lingering depth, but that fruitiness ontop is not just the chilli and peppercorns. There’s definitely grape or apple in here, too.

Not to mention a surprising undertone of plant greenery, seeping in from the “onions”, themselves.

Those “onions” – Or shallots, if we’re being accurate – are definitely greener than I expected. Tasting more like spring onion than anything else, yet with far more size and crunch.

The pickling juice has soaked into them quite considerably, resulting in both the colour change, which you saw above, and a tonne of that malty, fruity tang, complementing their own, natural zing. Yet their firmness is still very much intact.

As for their heat, the allium zing, the vinegar acidity and the subtle, aromatic notes of the peppercorns all make it hard to determine, as I’m eating the things, but the high

tingle, across the front half of my tongue, is impossible to miss, when I’m done. And it’s almost as strong as the

vinegar, itself.

These are a damn good snack and, while I personally prefer pickled eggs, there’s so much more nuance to Chilli Bobs’ pickling that there was to Purely Pickled Eggs’. The namesake pink peppercorns being among the subtlest elements but, even so, contributing their own little punch of peppery, yet berry like, aromatic fruitiness to the entire thing.

Their full ingredients consist of:

Shallots, Vinegar, Pink Peppercorn, Dried Red Chillies, Sugar, Mustard Seeds, Chilli Powder.

And they sound simple but there’s a world of complexity to the end result. Making Chilli Bobs’ Pink Peppercorn & Chilli Pickled Onions a real must for pickle lovers.