Banana Pepper vs Pepperoncini

Both turn up pickled, pale and sliced into rings, and both are mild enough to eat by the handful, which is why they are mixed up constantly. Look at the skin and the shape and they separate easily. A banana pepper is smooth, waxy and tapers cleanly to a point. A pepperoncini — friggitello in Italy — is shorter, more wrinkled, and rounder at the end.

They come from different places and different food cultures. The banana pepper is a twentieth-century American development out of Hungarian wax stock, and it belongs to the world of pizza, sub rolls and jarred rings. The pepperoncini belongs to Italy and Greece, where it is fried whole in oil as often as it is pickled, and it turns up in antipasti and Greek salad rather than on a pizza.

Heat is close enough not to be the deciding factor: both sit low, with the pepperoncini usually carrying a fraction more. If a jar in your fridge says one and you suspect the other, it genuinely does not matter much — which cannot be said of the banana pepper's other lookalike, the Hungarian hot wax, which can be thirty times hotter.