Everyday, you reach for your pepper grinder and grind a bit of the savory spice that helps to flavor all sorts of foods. You might not have realized it, but peppercorns have achieved a gourmet status in all types of cuisines. There are several different types of peppercorns as well as a plethora of ways to use them.

Gourmet peppercorns come in a variety of different colors, including white, green, black and pink peppercorns. There are also different varieties of peppercorns available. Some of the most popular for cooking include Malabar and Tellicherry peppercorns.

Peppercorns come from the Pepper plant with the botanical Latin name of Piper nigrum, which is a perennial woody vine that finds its home in India. Once the plants mature, in four to five years from being planted, then they begin to produce fruit called drupes, which are the peppercorns.

Gourmet peppercorns go through several color changes as they make their way toward the prime time to harvest them. When the peppercorns are mature they turn a brilliant red color. Immature pepper is green, it is through special processing that gourmet peppercorns are dried to retain their green color. When peppercorns undergo certain types of processing they can also change color. When green pepper is cooked and then dried, it turns into what we use everyday as black pepper, because the cooking and drying darkens the outer layer of the peppercorn which covers the seed. When the skin is removed from around the peppercorn seed and the seed alone is then dried, the result is white pepper. Red pepper can be dried and labeled as “pink’; there is also another type of pink pepper that comes from different plants entirely, including Schinus molle and Schinus terebinthifolius. Pepper gets its distinctive flavor from the naturally occurring chemical piperine, which is found in pepper.