Parameswaran’s Special Wynad Special Pepper
Vishnu's family has been producing and exporting Parameswaran's Special Wynad Pepper for 30 years and more.
Vishnu's family has been producing and exporting Parameswaran's Special Wynad Pepper for 30 years and more.
I received a lovely email this week from a gentleman in India - Akash Parameswaran, or Vishnu, as he is known to friends. He had been helping his father on the family pepper farm and had come across an old swing tag with "specially packed for Provender Brown" printed on it. Having found us online, he reached out to see if we were still selling their pepper.
We do indeed still sell Parameswaran's Special Wynad Pepper and it is some of the best pepper in the world. Akash sent me a link to this article by acclaimed food writer, Jill Norman, about her visit to his family estate a few years ago. It transported me across the continents to Kerala and is well worth a read. A Visit To A Pepper Plantation >>>
Vishnu's family has been producing and exporting Parameswaran's Special Wynad Pepper for 30 years and more. The finest pepper in India, and arguably the world, grows in the Wynad Plateau in Kerala. Parameswaran's pepper is grown on a small estate in Wynad, in a beautiful valley where elephants are common, and tigers are still occasionally seen.
Peppercorns are the fruit of the vine 'piper nigrum', and are generally picked between January and March, when it is harvested green and dried in the sun. However, unlike any other pepper on the market, Vishnu's family let the berries ripen on the vine naturally, which along with several other factors - only natural water buffalo and cow manure composts are used - makes Parameswaran's Special Wynad Pepper the best pepper in India, if not the world.
This process does make the pepper berries more difficult and time consuming to collect, but it is worth the extra effort due to the intensity of flavour unmatched by the green. Due to the trickier nature of the collection though, it is in short supply and therefore comes as limited batches.
It is single estate, organic, ripened on the vine, hand picked and sundried before being graded, cleaned and packed by hand to be shipped direct from Cochin.
Like fine wines, the quality of pepper varies from year to year and this year's pepper is being picked now, in batches, for the Provender Brown customers. This is truly a wonderful product and if you haven't tried it, please do drop into the deli or click over to our shop here >>>
JILL NORMAN is a British editor and food writer who visited Vishnu's farm twice. Her article transports you to the fields of India and is well worth a read >>>
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