Seattle's Peter Piper picks and pickles packs of peppers proudly

Every year from the end of August to the first frost, Howard Lev is a busy man. Not that he's a slacker the other 10 months of the year, but when the pepper crop in the Yakima Valley reaches its peak, Lev is in a race with time and the weather, picking, processing and packing peppers as fast as he and his crew can manage.

Lev is Seattle's very own Peter Piper, marketing pickled Hungarian goathorn peppers in oil, along with Peppalilli (a mustard pickle and pepper relish) and Asparagini (spicy pickled asparagus spears) under the Mama Lil's brand name, in homage to his mom.

Lil Lev kept her son regularly supplied with jars of her own pickled peppers back when he was an English major at the University of Washington in the '70s. It's a taste that never fails to remind Lev of his youth in Youngstown, Ohio.

"Everyone there knows these peppers. Used to be you'd go into a restaurant and they'd give you a bowl of peppers in oil with bread for dipping. They still do it, only now they charge for it and it's an appetizer," says Lev. According to Mama Lil's Web site (www.mamalils.com) Abruzze's 422, a restaurant in Warren, Ohio, claims to have been the first to serve them in 1934.

Lev always thought his mother's recipe was part of her Jewish Rumanian heritage, "until I met the Hungarian woman who taught her the recipe, and the Serbian woman who taught the Hungarian woman." Now he thinks it's more likely that this style of peppers originated with the Italian immigrants from the Abruzzi region of Italy who settled in Youngstown, Warren, Steubenville and other small towns in northeastern Ohio.

As Lev likes to say, "It's a recipe that spans the Balkans, salutes Italy and honors Jewish motherhood."

It's also a nod to the Pacific Northwest. The long, slender Hungarian goathorn peppers Lev remembers from his youth were green; whereas the climate in the Yakima Valley allows peppers to fully ripen and achieve the brilliant red, yellow and orange hues that make Mama Lil's products so distinctive.

Peppers pop up around town

Seattle chefs are among Mama Lil's most ardent admirers. The colorful pepper rings and relish, which come in mild, "Honkin' Hot" or "Kick Butt" versions, animate antipasti, pizza, pasta, sandwiches, and eggs at places as diverse as Brad's Swingside Cafe, 1200 Bistro, Serafina, Matt's in the Market, Cassis, Earth & Ocean, Machiavelli, Stella's Pizza, DeLaurenti and Salumi. Mama Lil's Asparagini add panache to Bloody Marys served at Elysian Brewing Co.

Whole Foods and PCC Natural Markets use Mama Lil's peppers to perk up their deli sandwiches. The products are also on the shelves there, as well as at Metropolitan Markets, Larry's Markets and Central Market. The 9-ounce jars retail for about $6.50; the 16-ounce jars are $8.50.

Frequent farmers-market shoppers may have encountered lanky, pony-tailed Lev offering samples of his products. "A lot of small producers now are going direct to the customer, especially through farmer's markets, and don't do wholesale at all," he notes.

Sampling is good exposure and bumps up retail sales, but wholesale food service has lately become the bulk of Mama Lil's business, especially now that the peppers are a key condiment at Panera, a St. Louis-based chain of bakery/cafes highly regarded for the quality of their breads and sandwiches.

"Panera first called me in 2000," Lev recalls. "Evidently their executives had tasted my peppers on sandwiches here in Seattle. I sent them a case and they were interested, but nothing happened."

Then last year, according to Lev, Panera called again, wanting to test-market the peppers in five stores; if it worked, a 30-store regional test would follow; and if that went well, they'd go national, which means 531 stores in 30 states.

"I guess the five-store test went well," he says wryly, "because they skipped the regional test and decided pretty quickly to roll them out nationally."

A different path

Lev, 48, didn't start out to be a pickled pepper pusher; he first pursued a writing career.

"I tried to break into screenwriting for a long time, and I sold a few options over the years. But the joke is, when I sent scripts to producers or agents, I would send a jar of peppers to get their attention. Then I'd call and they'd say, 'Yeah, it's a nice script, but what about those peppers? Did you make those?' "

He made his first commercial batch in 1992, processing 250 jars of peppers by hand with a group of friends in a church kitchen. Within a decade he was processing 20 tons. Last year, he contracted for 5 acres of peppers; this year 10 farmers are growing 50 acres of peppers just for Mama Lil's. Each one is still processed by hand, with Lev involved every step of the way.

He haunts the fields at harvest time, hauls truckloads of peppers over the mountains and usually works right alongside the kitchen crew as they seed and slice each one individually. The employees at NorStar Specialty Foods, where this year's crop is being processed, are such experts at what they do that Lev says he's learning things from them.

NorStar's commercial kitchen is about as far from a church kitchen as the space shuttle is from the Wright Brothers' flying machine. In fact, NorStar is a tightly run Hazardous Activity and Critical Control Points facility, a concept first developed by NASA for the space program and widely accepted today as the best way to ensure safe production of food products.

"Everything will be thoroughly documented," explains Lev. "We'll basically know by looking at a bucket, from which field and what day those peppers were picked." Standards are so stringent that even casual visitors to the chilly kitchen must suit up first in long white coats, hairnets and masks that cover the mouth and nose.

Pickling the peppers is a two-day process carefully monitored to achieve just the right pH level. After the vinegar is drained, the peppers are submerged in barrels of extra virgin olive oil, expeller-pressed canola oil and spices, where they marinate for at least three months under just the right conditions.

"My peppers get better with age," says Lev, who still has some of the last jars his mother put up more than 10 years ago. "In my cellar I have a case from every year I've made peppers. When really special company comes over for dinner I'll go in and get a 5-year-old jar. They are really, really delicious."

Peppers bound for markets or restaurants are eventually packed in buckets; those destined for jars are sent to a packing plant, where part of the process involves "cooking" the jars.

"It's so tricky, and I've always been really picky about it. Controlling the temperature readings is so very important," says Lev. "It's fresh product, and if it cooks too long it'll turn to mush. So many arguments have gone on over this issue in the past that I finally got a processing license. So when I'm there, I'm running the oven."

Expanding the business

Lev gets little down time during the two-month harvest season. The rest of the year he dons his sales and marketing cap.

"My father once came out to see what I do, and he told me, 'You're a schlep.' And it's true. When we're not in production what I do is schlep peppers from my warehouse to stores. Usually you have a broker do that, but my peppers are expensive enough, and right now my profit margin is pretty small. If I had to pay a broker, I'd have to raise the price."

Mama Lil's product line has expanded over the years somewhat serendipitously. One grim night years ago when none of his crew showed up, Lev was prepping peppers all alone. "I started thinking, if I don't take out the seeds I'll have a hotter pepper."

He brainstormed the idea with some people, including Seattle artist Julie Paschkis, who had designed the original Mama Lil's label featuring two goats butting heads. She thought of turning the goats around so they were kicking each other's backsides, and thus was born Mama Lil's Kick Butt Peppers, soon followed by the Honkin' Hot Peppalilli.

Will success spoil Howard Lev?

"I don't get to read as much as I'd like anymore, but I do take literature seriously and love to read poetry, listen to good music and watch great movies," he says. He dreams about having some sort of writing project in his life again someday.

Still, he says he derives great satisfaction from the idea that his business is to preserve things, to keep things beautiful, a thought that has taken on poignant new meaning since his mother died last November. Now more than ever, each new vintage of Mama Lil's peppers sustains the memory of Lil Lev.