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General Description of red bell pepper
Red bell pepper is one of the varieties of paprika. The shrub is perennial but grown as an annual plant. The fruits are large, hollow, thick, fleshy, and juicy walls (up to 6 mm) of a sweetish taste. They are red, yellow, orange and green. People have been using them for food since ancient times. Pepper originally grew in Central America, from where it was brought to Spain in the 16th century.
Further spread throughout Europe and Asia Minor. It came to Europe and the Bulgarian settlers (thanks to whom he got his name) in the 19th century and became very popular, especially in European cuisine. Currently, all yellow, orange and red sweet peppers are classified as bell peppers. It is eaten raw and processed.
Each vegetable is healthy in its own way, and each should be present in the diet. But doctors recommend eating bell pepper every day because it contains rare vitamins and can prevent many diseases.
Vegetable pepper is a species of herbaceous plants of the Solanaceae family and also an agricultural vegetable crop. There are many types of peppers: sweet, Bulgarian, salad, chili, and others. It can also be red, yellow, white, and green. The most popular and used is bell pepper, and the most useful is red hot.
Secrets and features of cooking of red bell pepper
Bell peppers are good to eat fresh; you may boil, bake, stew, fry in a pan, and grill them as well. People add it to dishes as a condiment and cook it as a separate dish. Pepper adds an appetizing aroma, interesting flavor to food and looks great in any dish. People use it in soups, casseroles, vegetables, and meat stews, baking and making salads (both fresh and processed fried or baked). Snacks from it look beautiful on the festive table.
An excellent dish is stuffed red bell pepper. People stuff it with meat, rice, buckwheat, and other cereals, with and without vegetables. For some dishes, you should bake peppers in the oven or on the grill. In this case, after cooking, you must carefully remove the peel and only use the pulp, which becomes especially tender and aromatic when baked.
A vegetable can be harvested in various ways – dried, dried, frozen, canned independently, and in combination with other vegetables. Freezing allows maximum preservation of useful properties. For this, the washed and dried fruits are cut into strips and frozen in the freezer.
Since olden times, people harvested pepper in the form of a powder – pre-dried fruits were ground into powder and stored in this form and used in dishes.
Beneficial features of red bell pepper
Sweet peppers are rich in vitamins and other useful substances. Therefore they are recommended in medical and healthy nutrition. It should be used only raw for maximum effect since up to 70% of nutrients are lost during heat treatment. Bell pepper improves eye health, serves to prevent malignant neoplasms, prevents anemia, perfectly strengthens the immune system, and is useful for losing weight.
Pepper normalizes sleep, improves mood, and strengthens memory. It perfectly strengthens the walls of blood vessels, thins the blood, and stabilizes blood pressure. As an external remedy, it helps with arthritis and neuralgia; it is also effective for sciatica. It improves the appearance and condition of nails and hair, prevents baldness, and makes the skin more elastic. Due to its high content of important trace elements, it is beneficial during pregnancy.
Red bell peppers are the richest in vitamin C among vegetables and second only to rosehips among other products. It also contains a rare vitamin P, which helps the heart and blood vessels. Besides, pepper contains several B vitamins that improve sleep, mood, strengthen hair, and smooth the skin. It also contains potassium with iron, necessary for our heart and blood; silicon, hair, and nails love. Iodine improves metabolism and the level of intelligence; beta-carotene, which increases immunity and improves vision; antioxidants, which prevent aging.
Harm
Bell pepper is contraindicated:
- with diseases of the stomach and duodenum;
- any diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, accompanied by an increase in acidity;
- hypertension;
- heart rhythm problems;
- heart diseases;
- epilepsy;
- with diseases of the liver and kidneys;
- people prone to allergic reactions.
- Also, it should be used with caution by children under 3 years old, pregnant, and breastfeeding women.
Use in cosmetology
Red bell pepper is great to use to make masks for the skin to increase blood circulation. To do this, you should mix ground pepper with white clay and then dissolve the mixture in boiled water. The mask should have the consistency of sour cream of medium density. After applying the pepper mask, the skin condition improves, the color becomes healthier, and more even, dark circles under the eyes disappear.
People also use it for skin whitening. To make a whitening pepper mask, you need sweet bell peppers. Rub half of the pod on a fine grater. The resulting gruel is rubbed into the skin after cleansing procedures for half an hour. At the end of the period, wash off the pepper with cool water, and a suitable nourishing cream is applied to the skin. This mask helps to even out skin tone, smoothing out age spots. Vitamins that red bell peppers contain nourish the skin and improve its general condition. Even though bell peppers are not hot, they also increase blood circulation, and there is no danger of getting burned.
Anti-aging properties
Red bell pepper is also suitable for the preparation of anti-aging cosmetics. For this, mix 1 tsp. Beeswax with 2 tbsp. Bone marrow and melt it in a water bath. Part of a pod of hot red pepper about 1 cm is ground and mixed with 1 tbsp—olive oil. Fresh foliage of nettle, birch, mountain ash, currant, parsley, lemon balm, and rose petals, taken in equal proportions, are ground into a homogeneous mass weighing about 20 g. Mix all ingredients and place them in a cool storage place. You should apply the anti-aging cream to the skin of the neck and face.
For aging skin, there is a recipe for a red bell pepper mask. To prepare it, you need not hot but red sweet pepper, crush one pod of it in any convenient way. Then add 1 tbsp to the pepper gruel, add honey and mix thoroughly. Apply the pepper mask to the skin for 20 minutes. After that, wash it off with cool water. The skin after the procedure looks noticeably healthier and fresher.
Another anti-aging recipe consists of a red bell pepper pod, raw chicken egg, and 1 tsp—sour cream. It would help if you chopped peppers and beat egg, then combine them and mix with sour cream. Apply the mask to the skin for 20 minutes. After that, wash it off with warm water. After this procedure, washing with cool water is beneficial.
Composition and calorie content
Bell pepper contains vitamins of group B, vitamins A, C (the maximum amount among peppers), E, PP, and K. Minerals: potassium, calcium, selenium, magnesium, phosphorus, sodium, copper, manganese, zinc, and iron.
Caloric content is 20-29.5 kcal per 100 g of product.
Red bell pepper: recipes
Classic. How to cook stuffed peppers with and without meat
This vegetable is trendy in cooking. The most common pepper dish is probably stuffed pepper, although grilled peppers are also gaining popularity. And in Mexican and Latin American cuisine, chili peppers are among the top products.
Peppers are most useful raw, so preparing them for the winter is better to do in a raw form in the freezer. To freeze peppers, you need to wash them, dry them, peel them off the stalk and seeds, and then either put them in the freezer right in this form or cut them and freeze them in zipping or vacuum bags in portions.
But even baked peppers are still very useful, so you can prepare them for the winter in this form.
Baked peppers for the winter
Ingredients per 0.5 can:
- 700 g pepper
- 1 tbsp with a pile of salt
- 80 ml vegetable oil
Preparation:
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees, oil the peppers, and place them on a baking sheet. Bake the peppers for about 30 minutes, until tender, then peel the peels and, if desired, the stalks and seeds. Next, fold the peppers tightly into prepared jars, sprinkling each with salt. Fill the peppers with calcined oil, sterilize the jars and roll them up.
Check out the video below on how to roast red bell peppers right so they come out crazy delicious:
