Alton Brown Punches Up This Old-School Egg Dish With A Powerful Pepper Blend

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Famed TV chef Alton Brown is known for his deep dives into recipe development, so you know he's got a canon of recipes that cover all kinds of dishes. When it comes to one popular finger food that people often serve at get-togethers, deviled eggs, Brown has his own take that steers the egg yolk filling in a decidedly sharper and spicier direction than most.

In one of his deviled egg recipes featured on his website, Brown uses not one, but five types of peppercorns to bring up the heat level. He explains that the original recipe featured on his show "Good Eats" only had four types, but the updated version has an additional one tacked on for even more peppery flavor. He writes, "Strong? Yes. But the cool thing about egg yolks is that they can hold the heat in check so that the more complex flavors of the peppers can come through." 

Four are traditional dried colored peppercorns (pink, white, black, and green), while the last one is markedly different. That's because they're brined green peppercorns, which are kind of the wild card in the recipe. As you'd infer from the name, these are indeed green peppercorns stored in brine. Rather than being dried out like black peppercorns, they're harvested and brined in the jar straight from fresh. (You can also find freeze-dried green peppercorns without the brine.)

Even though this many types of peppercorn might sound like more of a gimmick than a culinary tool, each peppercorn does have a different flavor to it. Pink peppercorn certainly looks like a standard peppercorn (other than the color), but it's actually the ripe berry of the Brazilian pepper tree — not to be confused with the peppercorn plant, which is a vine that produces the peppercorn you're more familiar with. (Regular peppercorns are also actually berries.) The other colors are variations on the one you already know. Green peppercorns are the undried, unripe berries; black peppercorns are the dried, unripe berry; and white peppercorns are just black peppercorns with the skin removed.

If you're looking for other ways to showcase the different types of peppercorns, you could make a slightly different take on a steak au poivre, a maximalist plate of cacio e pepe, or include a pepper mix in places you wouldn't ordinarily expect, like Alton Brown does with his deviled egg recipe. Heat is one aspect of their flavor, but you can't deny there's a fruity, sharp, and citrusy note to them too. Peppercorn in your next chocolate cake, perhaps?