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The red pepper has more vitamin C than an orange

Also called red capsicum, red sweet pepper

127.7 mg of vitamin C per 100 g, more than twice what an orange carries. It is also nothing more exotic than a green pepper that nobody picked.

127.7 mg vitamin c 3 recipes here use it

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Red bell peppers
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The numbers

Nutrition per 100 g, raw
NutrientAmount% RI
Calories 31 kcal —
Vitamin C 127.7 mg 160%
Vitamin A 157 µg 20%
Protein 1 g 2%
Carbs 6 g —
Fibre 2.1 g 8%
Potassium 211 mg 11%

Source: USDA FoodData Central · FDC ID 170108 · % RI against EU adult reference intakes.

Buying and keeping

What to look for at the shop, and how to make it last once it is home.

How to pick

  • Heavy for its size, with taut skin and no soft patches around the shoulders where they bruise first.
  • A dry, firm green stem. A shrivelled or blackened stem means it has been off the plant a fortnight, whatever the flesh looks like.
  • Deep, even colour. Patches of green mean it was picked early to survive transport, and it will taste thinner and cost the same.
  • Three lobes or four makes no difference to sweetness or to sex, despite what you have read. Lobe count is variety and growing conditions.
  • Weight for weight, the ones sold loose are usually fresher than the ones sealed in a tray of three.

How to store

  • Fridge drawer, unwashed and unbagged. One to two weeks.
  • Once cut, wrap the cut face against the flesh and use within three days. The seeds go slimy before the flesh does, so take them out first.
  • Roast and peel a batch, then keep them submerged in oil in the fridge for a week. This is the single best use of a glut.
  • Freezes well raw: slice, freeze flat on a tray, then bag. The texture goes soft on thawing so use them for cooking only.
  • Keep them away from apples and bananas. Ethylene accelerates the softening.

Best months

If you have none

Swaps that hold up, with what changes when you use them.

Yellow or orange pepper One for one. Slightly less vitamin C, slightly sweeter.
Jarred roasted peppers Excellent in stews and dips. Drain well or the dish goes watery.
Green pepper Works, but it is grassier and much less sweet. Not a swap in anything raw.
Piquillo peppers Jarred, Spanish, already roasted and peeled. Sweeter and slightly smoky, and excellent in anything blended.

Green, yellow, red: the same fruit

A green pepper is an unripe red one. Left on the plant it turns yellow, then orange, then red, getting sweeter and roughly doubling its vitamin C on the way.

That is also why red costs more. It occupies the plant for several weeks longer, which is several weeks the grower cannot use that space for anything else, and a ripe pepper bruises far more easily in a crate than a green one does.

Vitamin C per 100 g, raw

  1. Red bell pepper 127.7mg
  2. Kiwi 92.7mg
  3. Green bell pepper 80.4mg
  4. Strawberry 58.8mg
  5. Orange 53.2mg
  6. Lemon 53mg

Source: USDA FoodData Central

How to roast and peel them

Whole, under a hot grill, turned every few minutes until blistered and black in patches. Ten minutes or so.

Then into a bowl with a plate over the top for ten minutes. The trapped steam lifts the skin away and afterwards it comes off in sheets under your thumb. Do not run them under the tap to hurry it along; you will wash away the smoky oil that was the entire point of standing at the grill.

What to do with a glut

Roast the lot, peel them, and pack them into a jar under olive oil with a bashed garlic clove. A week in the fridge, and the oil afterwards is worth as much as the peppers.

They go into sandwiches, onto toast with anchovies, blended into a sauce for pasta, or chopped through a bowl of chickpeas. This is the most useful thing you can do with a bag bought on offer, and it takes half an hour of mostly waiting.

Questions

Is a red pepper really higher in vitamin C than an orange?
Yes, and it is not close. USDA lists 127.7 mg per 100 g for raw red bell pepper against 53.2 mg for a raw orange, roughly two and a half times as much.
Should I peel peppers?
Only when roasting them for a smooth dip or sauce, where the skin curls into bitter shards. In a traybake or a stew, leave it on.
Why are some peppers bitter?
Under-ripe fruit, usually green ones sold as green rather than picked green. A properly red pepper is sweet; if yours is not, it was picked early and coloured in transit.
Are the white ribs inside worth removing?
They are slightly bitter and slightly tougher, so yes for anything raw. In a long-cooked stew they disappear and it is not worth the knife work.
Can I eat the seeds?
They are harmless and taste of very little. They also go slimy first in a cut pepper, which is the practical reason to take them out.

Recipes using red bell pepper

3 on the site so far.

All recipes →
Roast chicken thighs on a tray with peppers and chickpeas
Traybakes

Harissa roast chicken traybake

Chicken thighs roasted on top of chickpeas and red peppers, so the fat renders down into everything underneath. One tray, one wash-up.

28 July 2026 1 hr