Here's everything worth knowing about orange bell pepper and how to pick it, what it is, how to store it, and what to use instead, plus 13 recipes to cook tonight.

What is orange bell pepper?

The orange bell pepper is a ripe sweet pepper with no heat at all, just clean sweetness and crunch. Its color comes from ripening fully on the plant, which is what builds the sugar.

A green bell pepper is the same kind of fruit harvested before it ripens. Green peppers taste grassy and faintly bitter, while a fully colored pepper has turned that bitterness into sweetness.

Orange falls right in the sweet tier alongside red and yellow, noticeably sweeter and more fruity than green.

The color also happens to survive cooking best, holding its bright tone where red can dull.

Using Orange Bell Peppers

Raw is where the color earns its keep. Cut into strips for a crudite platter or sliced into a salad, an orange pepper brings sweetness and a glow that green can't. Lentil & Sweet Pepper Salad uses that brightness against earthy lentils.

Roasting deepens everything. Char the skin under a broiler or over a flame until blackened, steam it covered for ten minutes, then slip the loosened skin off. What's left is silky and smoky, sweeter than before, the foundation of Pasta with Mixed Roasted Peppers Vinaigrette.

For high heat, peppers hold up well. They keep some bite in a quick stir-fry like Stir-fry Chicken and Spaghetti, and their flat-sided wedges thread cleanly onto skewers for Veggie Kabobs.

Stuffing is a natural too. A whole orange pepper, top cut off and seeds removed, makes a sturdy edible bowl, and a mix of colors gives you Rainbow Stuffed Peppers.

Pairing and Common Mistakes

Sweet orange peppers play well with tomato, corn, black beans, basil, garlic, and feta, as in Black Bean, Corn & Bell Pepper Salad. Their sugar also balances acid, so they round out a vinaigrette or a tomato sauce.

The most common mistake is treating green and orange as interchangeable. They are not.

Subbing green into a dish built on the sweetness of a ripe pepper leaves it grassy and a little sharp, which throws off salads and salsas especially.

The other slip is skipping the steam step after roasting. Peel a charred pepper straight away and the skin clings and tears. Let it sweat under a lid or in a bowl first, and the skin lifts off in sheets.

Substitutes

Reach for a red or yellow bell pepper first. Both sit in the same sweet, ripe tier, so the flavor barely changes and only the color shifts. Yellow is the closest visual match.

If sweetness matters more than color, a sweet Italian frying pepper such as cubanelle works, milder-walled and a touch less sugary. Use a green bell pepper only when you actually want that grassy edge, since it will pull a sweet dish in a different direction.

Buying and Storing

Pick peppers that feel heavy for their size with taut, glossy skin and a firm green stem. A deep, even orange signals full ripeness and the most sugar.

Skip any that are wrinkled, soft, or dull, since that is the look of a pepper on its way out.

Store them unwashed in the crisper drawer, loose or in a vented bag, where they keep for one to two weeks. Whole peppers last far longer than cut ones, so slice only what you need.

Once cut, wrap the rest tightly and use it within a few days. Bell peppers also freeze well if you slice them first, though they soften on thawing, which makes the frozen ones best for cooking rather than raw use.

Quick facts

In Chinese

橙色的柿子椒

British (UK) term

Orange bell pepper

en français

Poivron orange

en español

Paprika anaranjado

Recipes using orange bell pepper

There are 13 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 13 recipes