Jimmy Nardello

Jimmy Nardello produces long, slender, thin-walled pods that taper to a gentle twist at the tip, ripening from green to a deep crimson red. The ripe skin is thin, wrinkled, and almost translucent in spots, the surest way to identify it. Eaten raw, the flesh carries no heat at all, just a clean sweetness with a faint fruitiness closer to a sun-dried tomato than a typical pepper. That same thin wall is what makes it behave so distinctively in a pan, frying quickly, caramelizing readily, and losing almost no volume in the process, and its exceptionally sweet, rich flavor has made it the standard-bearer among Italian frying peppers.

Jimmy Nardello is best known as a frying pepper, its flavor turning creamy and intensely sweet once cooked in olive oil. That same light sweetness also suits eating the pods raw or cooking them fresh, and in southern Italy they are more commonly prepared dried.

Jimmy Nardello is a longer-season pepper, generally taking 80 to 90 days from transplant to ripen fully, and it rewards that patience with heavy production that continues until frost kills the plants. Ripening arrives in waves once the first pods begin turning from green to red, and because sugars build up as the color deepens, pods picked green taste noticeably milder and less sweet than those left to turn fully crimson. Overall the plants are described as extremely productive, yielding pods well suited to frying, freezing, or drying.

The variety traces to Ruoti, in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, where the Nardello family grew it in their home garden. In 1887 the family emigrated to Naugatuck, Connecticut, and Angela Nardello carried seeds of the pepper from Italy to plant in her new garden. The pepper takes its name from Jimmy Nardello, one of the couple's eleven children, who continued growing and saving the seed for decades. Shortly before he died in 1983, he passed seed along to the Seed Savers Exchange, and through that organization the variety was kept alive and shared more widely.