French Basque Pipérade

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In this weeks foray into the food of our ancestry, we tried our hand at a Basque (the Southwest of France/Northeast of Spain) Country dish known as Pipérade. (Check out last week's dish here!)

I thought the Basque region would be appropriate as my husband also has ancestry from Spain. We will be doing Spain in a later month, but I couldn't resist the fusion of Spanish and French foods. When I first saw the picture of Piperade I thought it looked so delicious and I couldn't get it off my mind. 

​So I share with you this amazingly delicious dish that I think will be made again in our home very soon!

Basque Pipérade

Looking at the ingredients in the recipe convinced me to make this dish. Tomatoes, onions, peppers, garlic, paprika...I basically already had all the ingredients on hand. Those are all staples in my kitchen. Add in the egg and a baguette, and it looked like a great meal! I especially liked that it was something relatively easy and inexpensive. I only needed to buy the baguette, and I could have made it myself if I wanted to save even more.

The colors of the vegetables represent the colors of the Basque region red, green, and yellow. The paprika added a really nice smokiness to the Pipérade as well as strengthening the red color.

You may remember that my sister served an LDS mission in France and she told me she had Pipérade while there. (Members of the church help to feed the missionaries all over the world). She had it with duck, and that it was delicious. In my research I found that adding game bird or egg to Pipérade is very common. I chose to go with egg because it just looked so delicious to me.

Unfortunately, I overcooked my yolks. I was so sad about this because I was really looking forward to the runny yolk with the Pipérade and baguette. I know what I did wrong too. Traditionally you cook the Pipérade on the stovetop and then you put the egg into the Pipérade and bake it for a few minutes. I don't have a pan that transfers to the oven, so I thought I would try to do it on the stove. But this was not successful. I put the lid on and it cooked much faster than I thought it would. Fortunately, I read somewhere that one person had grown up having scrambled eggs with Pipérade, so I just broke up my eggs and mixed it in. Next time I think I will transfer the Pipérade to a casserole dish and bake it that way. 

So for these reasons I don't have my recipe ready to share with you yet. I'm sorry! But I will share this recipe by Nic from Cured by Bacon. He uses canned veggies, but his recipe is the one that inspired me to make Pipérade. 

And please don't misunderstand, this was absolutely delicious, I just want to perfect my recipe before sharing it. So please give Pipérade a try and tell me how you like it. I think it's best eaten right away, using your baguette as a spoon. And definitely toast your baguette with a bit of olive oil. It was so good! Don't skip the baguette! 

Panna has awesome classes from Michelin-Starred chefs. I will be trying this Master French Cooking class. My mom has talked about them before when she made this delicious Chicken Cacciatore.