For those of us who automatically reach for the black-pepper grinder, Krissy Scommegna would suggest replacing it, if only temporarily, for a jar of piment d’Espelette. She likes how the chile’s red-orange hue makes for a beautiful garnish and how its flavor ads richness and depth to dishes (Bon Appetit describes it as having “hints of peach and sea brine, and a nuanced, subtle heat”). “It’s a flavor that chefs have in their repertoire, but it wasn’t very accessible to home chefs,” she says.
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Scommegna is the co-owner of Boonville Barn Collective in Northern California, which grows about a dozen varieties of hard-to-find chiles, including piment d’Espelette. You won’t find the scorpion or Carolina Reaper—the world’s hottest chile—among them, though. “We really don’t grow things for heat. We grow them for flavor,” she says.
If you’re wondering how someone ends up growing chiles in Boonville, a tiny farming community once devoted to apples and now to grapes, it helps to have an entrepreneurial dad. Roger Scommegna, a Wisconsin real estate executive turned wine importer, bought a small mountaintop vineyard near Boonville in the late 1990s. In addition to producing zinfandel, he also began investing in local businesses, including the historic Boonville Hotel. In 2011, Krissy Scommegna, newly graduated from college, started working at the hotel as an intern. The Boonville Hotel’s proprietor and chef, Johnny Schmitt, relied on piment d’Espelette for his French-inspired California cuisine. “We used an obscene amount of this expensive chile powder imported from the Basque region in France, and we thought, Why don’t we try to grow it here ourselves?” says Scommegna.
In 2012, Scommegna asked Nacho Flores, the manager of her father’s vineyard, to grow some Espelette chiles in the hotel’s kitchen garden. When the plants flourished, she figured out how to dry the fresh chiles using a food dehydrator after some of the first batch scorched in the oven. The locally produced piment d’Espelette tasted notably fresher than the imported stuff, inspiring her to sell piment d’Ville chile powder—named after Boonville, in the same way piment d’Espelette gets its name from the French town of Espelette. After going to grad school, working different jobs in the food industry, and meeting her now-husband, Gideon Burdick, Scommegna decided to lean into chiles. In 2019, the couple leased nine acres to form Boonville Barn Collective and expanded beyond chiles to produce olive oil and grow heirloom beans and strawberries. (The latter goes into locally produced jam.)
Much like Anderson Valley’s original farmers, who dried their apples so they wouldn’t spoil on the way to market, the Boonville Barn Collective team grow, harvest, and dry their chiles to prepare them for shipping. Most of the business continues to be piment d’Ville, but Flores, who is now the farm’s foreman, has introduced chiles that he grew up with in the Mexican state of Michoacán, including Yahualica, cascabel, and comapeño. In March, Flores and a helper were in the farm’s greenhouse getting this year’s crop going, teasing apart clumps of tiny chile seedlings and transplanting the individual sprouts into plant trays so they would have more room to grow. By September, there will be ripe chiles for harvesting. The chiles are air-dried in a greenhouse and then moved to a dehydrator, a two-part process that enhances their flavor while removing moisture. Last year, the team harvested 30 tons of fresh chiles, which produced about 5,000 pounds of dried chiles.
After talking to Scommegna for a couple of hours about chiles, I start to feel as though I’d been flavor-deprived my whole culinary life. “I think it’s easy for people to default to one, two, or four spices that they end up putting on all of their food,” she says. “It’s important to experiment with different chiles, especially because there’s so much more flavor and not just heat that you’re adding with them. It’s just a more fun way to cook.”
After experimenting with the new jar that showed up in our spice cabinet, my teenage daughter has found that piment d’Ville is delicious and looks great on another California treat: avocado toast.•
Lydia Lee writes frequently about design and architecture in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a local bicycle advocate.
