A wonderful combination of tangy taste and crunchy texture, bell peppers are the Christmas ornaments of the vegetable world with their beautifully shaped glossy exterior that comes in a wide array of vivid colors ranging from green, red, yellow, orange, purple, brown to black. Although peppers are available throughout the year, they are most abundant and tasty during the months of August and September.

The best known sweet peppers are bell peppers, named for their bell-like shape. They have a mild, sweet flavor and crisp juicy flesh. When young most bell peppers are a rich, bright green, but there are also yellow, orange, purple, red and brown bell peppers. Red bell peppers are green bell peppers that have ripened longer and are very sweet. The red heart-shaped pimiento is another popular sweet pepper.

Sweet bell peppers (Capiscum annuum) are in the same genus as hot chile peppers, though these peppers are blocky in shape with thick flesh walls and sweet flavor. The most common bell peppers are green, which are fully developed but not ripe. Red, orange, and yellow peppers are riper, sweeter, and pricier than green peppers. Suntan peppers are harvested when red or another color just starts to develop, leaving most of the pepper green. Many peppers on the market come from hothouses in Holland, Israel, and Canada. These peppers are evenly sized and have thick, juicy flesh and sweet flavor. Their calyxes are noticeably fleshy and firm. Sweet mini peppers were bred from bell peppers and hot peppers to develop a small, crunchy, sweet pepper with relatively few seeds.