It wasn’t love at first bite, but I finally warmed up to the shishito pepper.
The name is an abbreviation of “shishitogarashi,” which is Japanese for “the tip of this pepper looks like a lion’s face.” This description is as fanciful as looking for faces in clouds, but you don’t need to imagine a lion in order to appreciate the shishito.
Shishitos are finger-length, thin-skinned, wrinkled, and usually mild—but every now and then you’ll get a hot one, which keeps things exciting. My introduction to this pepper came at the farmers market in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where growers bill them as “frying chiles.”…