Padrón Pepper vs Shishito

Galicia and Japan arrived at the same dish independently. Both peppers are picked deliberately immature, fried whole in hot oil until the skins blister and collapse, salted, and eaten with fingers by the stalk. Both carry the same lottery — most are sweet and grassy, and every so often one arrives with genuine heat. The Galician saying is os pementos de Padrón, uns pican e outros non: some are hot and some are not.

Side by side the Padrón is a little squatter and thicker-walled, with a slightly firmer bite and a marginally higher chance of a hot one. The shishito is longer, thinner-skinned and more delicate, with a wrinkled tip that gives it its name — shishi, lion, for a resemblance to the guardian lion at a temple gate. Shishito blisters faster because there is less flesh in it.

For a British grower both are unusually rewarding, because neither needs to ripen. You are picking immature fruit, so the crop starts early and continues for months, and the plants keep producing as long as you keep picking. Leave either on the plant too long and it toughens and heats up, which is the one mistake to avoid.