Piperine
Also written piperin
Quick answer
The pungent alkaloid of black pepper — a slower, blunter, more quickly fading heat than capsaicin, produced by a different molecule that this dataset therefore refuses to measure on the Scoville scale.
What it does
Piperine gives a pungency that arrives faster than capsaicin and leaves faster, sits further forward in the mouth, and carries a faint bitterness capsaicin does not have. It is very much weaker by weight — the reason a dish can be peppered heavily and a chilli of the same mass would be inedible. What people identify as the smell of black pepper is not piperine at all but the volatile terpenes around it, which is why pepper ground a week ago still bites and no longer smells of anything much.
How it works
The physiological account, where one is established.
Piperine acts on the same population of heat-and-irritation sensing nerve endings that capsaicin does, which is why the two sensations are recognisably of a kind despite the enormous difference in potency and the difference in structure. It is not a capsaicinoid and there is no conversion between them.
How it behaves when cooked
Four properties of the molecule, and what they mean at the stove.
- Volatility
- low
- Fat solubility
- high
- Water solubility
- low
- Heat stability
- moderate
Piperine behaves like capsaicin in the pan and unlike it in the jar. It does not evaporate, so pepper does not lose its bite in storage or in a long braise, and it extracts into fat far better than into water. But it degrades slowly under sustained heat and light, which is one reason long-cooked dishes are often re-peppered at the end, and it isomerises on prolonged exposure to light into forms that are much less pungent. The practical rule that follows is the opposite of the one for chilli: pepper added at the start contributes body and pepper added at the end contributes bite and aroma, and a dish that wants both needs pepper twice.
Spices that carry it
Recorded on the compound rather than on each spice, so the two cannot disagree.
- Black pepperPrincipal component
- Long pepperPrincipal component
A different species carrying the same alkaloid, alongside a sweeter and more complex aromatic fraction that black pepper does not have.
- UzizaPrincipal component
The West African Piper, and the reason uziza is pungent rather than merely bitter. Same compound and same mechanism as black pepper, in a species that reached Europe by the Sahara routes rather than the Indian Ocean.
- White pepperPrincipal component
The same berry with the pericarp removed, so the piperine largely remains while much of the terpene aroma is lost — a hotter-seeming, less aromatic pepper from an identical fruit.
- Green peppercornMajor component
Picked unripe and preserved before the piperine content reaches its maximum, which is why green peppercorns taste fresh and herbal rather than sharply hot.
- CubebContributing component
Present at lower levels than in black pepper, and overtaken by the bitterness — which is why cubeb is a Piper with genuine piperine content that nobody uses for its pungency.
Not to be confused with
Compounds a reader is likely to take for this one, and why they differ.
Capsaicin
The heats are produced by unrelated molecules of vastly different potency. Scoville Heat Units are defined on capsaicinoid content and applying them to pepper is a category error, not merely an approximation.
Hydroxy-α-sanshool
Sichuan pepper is not a pepper and its sensation is not heat. The two are unrelated botanically and chemically, and the confusion is entirely an artefact of the English word "pepper".
Questions this page answers
- what is piperine
- what does piperine do
- which spices contain piperine
- what is piperin