There is nothing more foodie than ordering some food and having some dude (waiter or waitress) appear with an enormous bokken. This is also known as a black pepper dispenser (salt and pepper shakes, as well), and your waiter will grind the thing until your food is peppered with small little chunks of black pepper. Humans do this as it is tasty.

What is black pepper, anyway? Well, before you ask, it’s a cannonball which has never been used and never will be used. Rather than let these things go to waste, the cannonballs are sundried in order to shrink them down and make them bite sized. Inventive stuff, but no one’s ever dared be inventive enough to make black pepper soup before. For shame!

Black Peppercorn Soup

We tried out black pepper soup over the weekend and were so impressed it we decided to wait until today to write up the recipe. Not that it’s a complex thing to do- you’ll primarily need black peppercorns. Lots of them. Roughly about 1,000, but anything between 700 and 22,000 is acceptable (the latter figure is for weddings – blow your wedding guests away, literally, with the sneeze based power of black pepper soup).

Okay, so to make this thing you’ll need to melt 1,000g of butter into a pan, add 10g of salt to this, and then add in 200g of sugar. This is your stock. It’s been designed to be as unhealthy as possible in order to provide an overload of nutrients which black peppercorns are so lacking in.

Let this globule of badness begin to bubble away on a high heat (switch your cooker to the highest heat setting it has – to make things even hotter, turn your central heating to maximum, but on a bobble hat, and dance about the place). As this mixture froths like an outraged walrus, take at least 700 black peppercorns and smash, pulp, blend, and juice the lot into a fine paste.

But what about the sneezing?

You take that paste and add it to the frothing madness from before. Voila! Let it bubble away for a further 10 minutes, then ladle out the mixture into matching bowls. Allow the soup to cool, or consume immediately at your leisure (be prepared for agonising third degree burns if you pursue the latter option). Guess what? It doesn’t really taste of black peppercorns, for some reason.

Oh yeah, the sneezing! Black peppercorn soup does make one sneeze like a diplodocus which has been infected with a sneezing disease. This is unfortunate, but it’s a necessary evil if you want to enjoy the wholesome taste of this magical recipe. Whilst it may not taste like black peppercorns (there’s a subtle hint hidden behind the butter and sugar overload), it at least does something black peppercorns make you do. Which is sneeze. Groovy.