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Produce guide

How can you tell if a bell pepper is fresh?

By RIPE, checked against a produce manager's cues. Published .

Go by firmness and weight, not by shine. A fresh pepper is heavy for its size with taut, unwrinkled skin and a firm green stem. Wrinkles anywhere mean it has been losing water.

What to check

Feelfirm walls that do not flex under gentle pressure. Softness means it is going. Peppers get misted hard, and a misted pepper looks taut when it is not, so pick it up rather than trusting the look.
Looktaut skin with no shriveled patches or sunken dark spots. Check around the stem, which is where soft rot usually starts.
Avoidjudging by gloss. Peppers are frequently waxed, so shine tells you about the coating rather than the pepper.
Not a thingcounting the lobes on the bottom. There is no such thing as a male or female pepper, and a four-lobe pepper is not sweeter or less seedy than a three-lobe one. Lobe count is the variety and the growing conditions. Judge weight and firmness instead.
Buying for whengreenhouse peppers, the uniform blocky ones sold in sleeves or three-packs, are thicker-walled and the better winter buy. Field peppers peak in late summer, cost less, and often carry more flavor.
Common mistaketreating green peppers as second best. A green bell is usually the same fruit picked less ripe, which is why it tastes sharper. What you are paying extra for in a red, yellow or orange pepper is time: those stayed on the plant for weeks longer. That has a practical consequence nobody mentions. Because a colored pepper arrives further along its life, green peppers keep considerably longer in the fridge, so buy green for the back of the week and colored for tonight.

If they are not perfect: a pepper starting to wrinkle is a roasting pepper. Wrinkle does not survive a hot oven, and the water it has lost concentrates the flavor, so a slightly soft pepper roasts better than a taut one. Just do not slice it raw into a salad.

Written by the team behind RIPE, a free app that reads a photo of the whole produce pile and rings the ripest ones. Every cue above is one you can check with your own hands, and it all works with no app at all.

Where this comes from

These cues match the public guidance from university extension services. Read them yourself:

People also ask

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Keep going

How can you tell if mushrooms are still good?→ How should you store potatoes and onions?→ How do you keep lettuce and salad greens fresh?→ How do you pick a good butternut squash?→
All 45 produce guides