Nina swears the best banana pepper recipe in Buffalo lives above a restaurant, not inside one. She grew up on the Lovejoy side of town and I met her at a friend’s wedding in Chicago three summers ago. We stayed in touch through voice notes, the long kind. Last October she flew me out to see the neighborhood and to eat at her cousin Anthony’s red-sauce place on Lovejoy Street.
But the peppers she wanted me to try came from upstairs. From her nonna Rosa’s kitchen. Rosa is 82, sharp as a tack, and lives in the flat directly above the dining room where Anthony works dinner service.
The Apartment Above the Restaurant
I stayed in Nina’s spare room the first night. The second night Rosa cooked. Her kitchen smelled like garlic and warm parsley before she even lit the stove, that grassy sharp smell you only get when someone chops parsley in a bowl still slick with olive oil. She had a pile of yellow banana peppers on the table, long and slightly curved, some the length of my hand. She kept calling them her end-of-summer peppers, the last ones off the plant in her tiny backyard.
Rosa did not use a recipe card. She showed me. Sausage into a bowl, breadcrumbs in with a fistful, pecorino grated by hand on a box grater she has probably owned longer than I have been alive. One egg. Garlic. Parsley from the sill. And then, the thing I did not expect. Two anchovy fillets, mashed to nothing on the back of her spoon. She saw my face and laughed. “You will not taste fish,” she said in her Sunday-best English. “You will taste depth.” She was right.
While she filled the peppers Anthony’s kitchen was rattling directly below us. You could hear the ticket printer through the floorboards, and every so often a burst of Italian drifted up the back staircase. Rosa did not flinch. She has been listening to that noise for forty years.
A Buffalo Banana Pepper Recipe with Real Roots
Rosa’s version tracks with the actual history of the dish, which is more specific than most people realize. Stuffed banana peppers are Italian-American, not Italian. They came up in the rust belt around Buffalo, Youngstown, Cleveland, and Western Pennsylvania in the mid-20th century, largely in immigrant kitchens working with the mild Hungarian-descended banana pepper. That pepper only arrived in the U.S. in 1932 and got commercialized in 1940. Which is late enough that Rosa’s own mother would have been a young woman when they started showing up in local seed catalogues.
The cheese-and-anchovy version is often credited to a Buffalo chef named Andrew Divencenzo, who worked at Billy Ogden’s over in the Lovejoy neighborhood. A five-minute walk from Rosa’s building, as it happens. Nina told me this over espresso the next morning like she was telling me the weather. She reads a lot of local food history. She keeps a shoebox of clippings.
One thing worth saying. This is not a jalapeño popper. Banana peppers are much milder, 0 to 500 on the Scoville scale, and they bake in marinara instead of frying in a batter. Pickled pepper rings are a different food entirely. Do not use those here. Fresh yellow, or nothing.
What I Used
- 12 fresh yellow banana peppers, about 5 to 6 inches long each
- 1 lb loose Italian sausage, hot or sweet
- 3/4 cup grated Pecorino Romano, plus 2 tbsp for the top
- 1/2 cup Italian-style breadcrumbs
- 1 large egg, lightly beaten
- 3 cloves fresh garlic, finely minced
- 3 tbsp fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
- 2 oil-packed anchovy fillets, mashed to a paste
- 2.5 cups marinara sauce
- 3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
- Freshly ground black pepper and a pinch of salt
Bringing It Home to My LA Kitchen
Back home the biggest challenge was finding the peppers. The banana peppers at Ralphs are usually short and thick-skinned, the kind that would burst before the sausage cooked through. I ended up at the Hollywood farmers market on a Sunday morning, where a grower from Fillmore had a small crate labeled Sweet Hungarian. Close enough. Actually more than close enough. The grower’s name is Gil and I have been going back to him for two seasons now. Thin-walled, the right length, that pale yellow-green that turns silky when it bakes.
The sausage I get from the Italian deli around the corner from my apartment. Loose, not links, so I do not have to peel casings. The anchovies are the small oil-packed tin from the same shop. I have tried this with the cheaper supermarket ones. Not the same. Splurge the two dollars.
I fill the peppers over the sink because I am messy and the sausage mixture wants to escape. Push the filling all the way down to the tip with the back of a small spoon, or the tip stays hollow and disappointing. Do not overstuff either. I did once and the skin split in the oven and half the filling boiled out into the sauce. Still tasted great. Presentation was gone.
Mine bake at 350 F for about 38 minutes. The kitchen smells like a Sunday I did not grow up with but wish I had. Bubbling marinara, browning cheese, the faint sweetness of the peppers turning tender. My cast iron stays out for the next dish, and I use my one good chef’s knife with the wonky ivory handle for the parsley at the end.
Rosa serves them with crusty bread. Anthony’s restaurant serves them with spaghetti on the side. I do both when I have company and just bread when I do not. Chianti helps. Anything dry and red, really.
If You Are Adjusting Heat or Filling
Milder version, scrape out every last seed and every white rib. Little kick, leave a couple of ribs. I have made this once with vegetarian crumbles for a friend who does not eat pork. It was fine. Not the same. The sausage fat is carrying the whole dish and there is no clean swap for that. Frozen peppers do not work either. I tried. The skins go slack in the oven and the filling separates.
Leftovers keep three days in the fridge. Cover the tray with foil and reheat at 325 F. Cold leftovers, eaten standing up at the counter the next morning. Better than the original.
I texted Rosa a photo of my first tray a few weeks after I got home. She wrote back “brava” and a red heart. Nina keeps threatening to fly out and cook these in my kitchen. I hope she does.
Banana Pepper Recipe
Ingredients
Equipment
Method
- Preheat the oven to 350 F and lightly grease a 9x13 inch baking dish with 1 tablespoon of the olive oil.
- Rinse and dry the banana peppers. Slice off the tops just below the stem, then use a small paring knife and spoon to scrape out the seeds and white ribs. Remove more or fewer ribs depending on the heat level you want.
- In a large mixing bowl, combine the loose Italian sausage, 0.75 cup Pecorino Romano, breadcrumbs, beaten egg, minced garlic, chopped parsley, mashed anchovy, and black pepper. Mix with your hands just until evenly combined, about 30 seconds. Do not overwork.
- Pinch off small amounts of the sausage mixture and press it firmly into each pepper, working the filling all the way down to the tip with the handle of the spoon. Fill so the mixture is level with the opening but does not bulge out, or the skin will crack while baking.
- Spread 1.5 cups of the marinara sauce across the bottom of the baking dish. Arrange the stuffed peppers snugly in a single layer on top of the sauce, open ends facing up.
- Spoon the remaining 1 cup of marinara over and between the peppers, leaving the open tops mostly exposed so the filling browns. Drizzle the remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil over everything and sprinkle the reserved 2 tablespoons Pecorino Romano across the tops.
- Bake uncovered for 35 to 40 minutes, until the peppers are tender and wrinkled, the sauce is bubbling around the edges, and an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest sausage filling reads 160 to 165 F.
- Let the dish rest for 5 minutes before serving. Spoon extra sauce from the dish over each portion and finish with a small pinch of fresh parsley if desired.