Chet Sharma is a chef who knows a thing or two about spices. Downstairs at his Mayfair restaurant BiBi, there’s a kitchen-meets-laboratory filled with over eighty different kinds, including eleven varieties of peppercorn alone. Complex spicing is intrinsic to his cooking, his menu filled with progressive dishes with nuanced flavour profiles that transport diners across India. Chefs come to stage at BiBi to see his approach first hand, so when we began writing this feature about all things peppercorn, we knew who to talk to. ‘I can think of no spice better than peppercorn,’ Chet says. ‘For me, peppercorns represent so much about Indian food. When we think of post-colonisation, modern Indian food, we think of chillies and tomatoes. They were brought over to India, but historically my ancestors, for their primary source of heat, were using peppercorns.’

There are few spices as commonplace as pepper. From shakers of ground spice to Cambodian Kampot peppercorns, sought-after by fine dining chefs, we'd struggle to track down a kitchen in any restaurant, pub or home where it's not readily available in some form. But, as well as being limited to the varieties that line supermarket shelves, its inclusion in our cooking can be sidelined to a seasoning, often only elevated in a handful of dishes like peppercorn sauce or black pepper beef. We can, Chet says, put that down to pepper's ubiquity and its role as one half of the classic seasoning duo. ‘One of the biggest fallacies was we went from having salt on every table to then having salt and pepper,’ Chet says. ‘You never have salt and cumin, for example – why have we taken this one spice and given it that role? Pepper is a spice, not a seasoning.’

Though we associate them with warmth and spice, the aroma and flavour of peppercorns (the dried fruits of a flowering vine – piper nigrum – which is native to southern India) is nuanced and diverse, ranging from sweet and sharp to aromatic and, of course, spice-packed. That's all shaped by similar factors as with grapes; where they are grown, the area’s humidity and heat and when the berries were plucked from the vines. ‘We try to go really granular,’ Chet says. ‘From plantation to plantation you get different varieties, and grapes are a really good place to start. When we are sourcing, the first thing we look at is the latitude, where they are, how high they are growing and the distance from the equator.’ From the north to south of India alone, Chet points out, is not far off 2,000 miles – about the same distance as from London to Istanbul, and we’d certainly expect variety if we were considering vineyards. Peppercorns thrive in hot climates with plenty of rainfall and well-draining soil, like the pepper plantations of southern India, where there are extremely hot days and cold nights. 

When they are harvested – and what happens after – dictates a peppercorn's colour. Black ones, for example, are actually harvested when they’re green, and dried in the sun until they turn black, while green peppercorns come from underripe berries and often have a milder flavour, lending themselves particularly well to dishes where a subtler pepperiness is needed (Andy Beynon pickles them and uses them in his monkfish, leek and crab dish here). White peppercorns, meanwhile, typically less pungent than black ones, are left on the vine for even longer – the outside husk falls away, revealing the white of the berry (Shu Han Lee uses white pepper in her garlic, coriander and white pepper roast chicken rice). Pink peppercorns, which have brighter, fruitier notes, aren’t actually peppercorns at all; they're the dried berries of the Baies Rose plant. That's similar to Sichuan peppercorns, which come from a prickly ash shrub native to northern China. Then there's long pepper (piper longum), a relative of piper nigrum, another flowering vine which is used in similar ways. When we factor in the enormous variety from plantations across the world, as well as how they’re prepared – from pickling to infusing and grinding – it’s easy to see how many of us are only dipping into the world of peppercorns.

BiBi's menu celebrates that diversity; there's a raw beef pepper fry using Tellicherry peppercorns – grown on the Malabar coast in southern India – in four different ways; fermented green ones, soaked in a brine until they are black (giving a fresh vibrancy which sits somewhere between a caper and a peppercorn), charred until smoky and sweated in coconut oil, before the dish is finished with thirteen (no more, no less) turns of black pepper, giving a final warmth. Elsewhere, there’s a sweetcorn custard and blackcurrant dessert which uses plenty of heritage panniyoor peppercorns, a slow-maturing, less spicy variety from Kerala. 

In India, peppercorns’ history spans millennia – the piper nigrum vine was cultivated there as early as 2000 BC, with the allure of the berries quickly attracting the world’s attention. Pepper fast became a prized commodity – sought-after for both its culinary and medicinal properties – and was traded for centuries between the east and west, with traders navigating perilous routes for the valuable spice, which earned a nickname of black gold. During the Middle Ages, peppercorns became a symbol of wealth and power, a fascination which has endured.

Today, the vines are grown wherever the climate is right, creating peppercorns shaped by the local soil; from the piney notes of Sarawak peppercorns in Malaysia, the pungency of Lampong berries in Indonesia and the lemony fragrance of Vietnam's Phu Quocs. Over at Akoko in Fritzrovia, chef Ayo Adeyemi uses West Africa's penja peppercorns in his menu (including in his yam with winter truffles, penja and ehuru sauce dish here), which is grown in the volcanic soil of the Penja Valley in Cameroon. ‘It’s an amazing flavour profile,’ Ayo says ‘The white peppercorn has a really nice, numbing heat, but it’s not overpowering in the dish. It definitely has a mild to medium heat and a really nice fragrance on the nose – it works well with a lot of African dishes and we season a lot of stews and sauce with it.’ 

The first step towards broadening our horizons is understanding what's actually out there. Chet says – beyond a cast-iron rule of only using freshly-ground pepper, of course – it's a case of experimenting and having more awareness of what we're buying. There's a world of peppercorns to explore, and by understanding more about their subtleties, we can take pepper's role far beyond simply being salt's table companion.