Piperine and Essential Oil

Pepper owes its pungency to piperine and its aroma to essential oil. It is the balance between the two that is key to distinguishing pepper of different qualities and from different sources. As I learned from tasting sessions, peppercorns from India’s Malabar coast are wonderfully aromatic, thanks to an abundance of essential oil, whereas those from Malaysia and Indonesia tend to contain less essential oil and more piperine, making them pungent rather than aromatic.

To the scientists, piperine is an alkaloid with a formula of CHNO (interestingly, morphine shares the same formula but has different properties). Put more simply it is a chemical substance that gives pepper its pungent bite. It is found predominantly in the main body of the peppercorn rather than the outer husk. Weight for weight, white pepper, devoid of its husk, contains more piperine than black – up to 8% in some cases.