What you see: Brown rings, marks or stains, but no scar tissue, rot or other damage on your peppers. The rings won’t wash off.
What it is: Superficial, just-below-the-skin bruises, likely from how the peppers were positioned during transit.
Eat or toss: Eat! The pepper is fine.
What are the brown rings on this pepper?
As an avid eater of yellow, red and orange peppers, I’ve been seeing these weird brown marks a lot lately.
They don’t wash off. But the pepper’s skin isn’t broken and it doesn’t feel soft, like it’s been bruised. Weird, right?
Weird indeed, agreed Steve Sargent, professor and associate chair of the department of horticultural sciences at the University of Florida, when I shared the images in this post with him. He suspects, however, that the peppers simply suffered some very minor bruises while being shuttled around after harvest.
Peppers can get superficial bruises during transit
“You can imagine the truck going down the road, and you’ve got this high-frequency vibration constantly for hours,” he explained. “Potentially, that could cause a bruising or weakening of the tissue. It’s not really broken through the tissue. It is just disturbing the cells.”
The little circles in this image, for example? Those could be from a crate they were packed in. The impact busted some cells open, causing compounds normally kept separate to mix and oxidize into that brown color. But because the injury probably happened slightly below the skin, we just see browning under a mostly smooth and intact outer skin.
The dead cells would eventually collapse and deflate as they lost water, Sargent pointed out, which explains the slightly bumpy texture those little holes lent to the pepper.
Pepper “stains” that won’t wash off are likely minor injuries
I also sent Sargent the image below, which has messier patches of brown, but still that just-below-the-skin stained look. Here, he said it was possible that the pepper was traveling upright and the bottom portion of the lobes had the most contact with another surface, thus absorbing some impact and turning brown.
“That looks like it’s some kind of a physical contact area that vibrated, or was just under some little bit of pressure, enough to damage those external cells,” he said.
Sargent said peppers are often packed in one or two layers.
“They’re protected in the box, but sometimes the box can be overpacked, where they’re pushing on each other more.”
But at the end of the day, the damage is contained within the pepper, so there’s no additional food safety risk here. I’ve never noticed that areas with these brown patches taste any different from the rest of the pepper, possibly because the damage is so very slight. Still, any injury means the pepper may rot faster, so eat a pepper with this type of issue before any of its clearer-skinned neighbors.
