Black pepper known as “King of spices”, is the most widely used spice in the world.
Black pepper is the dried berries of the perennial evergreen climbing vine Piper nigrum.
India has the largest extent of area under pepper cultivation in the world followed by Indonesia. In India, black pepper is grown mainly in humid tropics such as Kerala, Karnataka in large extent and limited extent in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and other states.
Now let’s discuss about harvesting and processing of black pepper.
As shown in this flow chart these are the different stages from harvesting to storage.
Harvesting
If the pepper berries fully mature and one or two berries start turning to red then it’s a signal it’s time to harvest.
The bags to tied to their waist the harvester climb high. Each bunch is to be handpicked.
Threshing
The berries should be threshed immediately after harvesting. Any delay affects the quality of the plucked berries.
Threshing can be done in two ways that is manually or mechanically.
Threshing is usually done manually by shearing between the legs. But this is more labour oriented.
But recently there are few new innovations of threshing machines and these machine promises to be a good substitute for labour shortage.
A half HP, electric motor provides the energy for the machine. A stationary plate is provided with small holes to facilitate the threshed berries to fall through it.
The detached berries fall through the holes onto a stationary plate and get collected in bottom of the machine.
An opening door is provided at the other end of the device to collect the stalk after threshing.
The machine can thresh 100kg of pepper in an hour. “Manually it takes 6 hours to do the same. One person can thresh 100kg per day and the machine can run for six hours. The machine can thresh all varieties of pepper since the pepper size does not vary.
Drying
This is by far the most important section in the process.
To get the full black colour of dried pepper it needs to be dried in direct sunshine. This can be achieved by sun drying or solar drying. Sun drying is usually simplest and cheapest method.
The moisture content in well-dried pepper is never more than 10 to 11 %. During the dry season it will take 4 to 5days to get well-dried pepper.
Cleaning and Grading
Cleaning and Grading can be done by hand or machineries. Pepper is graded by size, colour and relative density. Colour grading will have to be done by hand. Machines can be bought or made that will grade the pepper according to its size or relative density. However, a trained person with a winnowing basket is more appropriate for small-scale production.
Packaging
Packaging of pepper especially requires polypropylene bag because if will not allow flavour components diffuse through it. The bags should be sealed and airtight.
Storage
Sealed bags should be stored at low temperature, a low humidity and free from pests. The shelf life of black pepper is life time.
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