Black Pepper

Black pepper is the dried berry of a flowering vine called Piper nigrum, which fruits in clusters like grapes. Technically, peppercorns are drupes, or stone fruits, like cherries and peaches. To make black pepper, farmers harvest the still-green unripe peppercorns and dry them either by machine or in the sun, which causes the thin fruit layer to darken and wither, raisin-like, around the seed, resulting in the characteristic dark, puckered peppercorns you load into your pepper grinder.