Capers, Demystified

Scientifically speaking, capers are the pea-sized, unopened flower buds of Capparis spinosa (Capparidaceae), a shrub prevalent in the Mediterranean region. Caper berries are the fruit of this same shrub. If you’ve never seen them, this picture is to-scale and shows their actual size.

Let’s break it down one time… So there’s this bush, right–the caper bush. It’s a flowering bush. Capers, the tiny little green balls you find pickled in jars, and caper berries, the slightly larger, berryish-looking green things also sold–stem intact–pickled in jars, are both this bush’s flower — cultivated before the flower had a chance to bloom. Tricky, huh?

It’s really not that tricky! Capers are the bud at earliest stage of development while caper berries are the bud at a later stage of development. So if you’ve got a bud at stage one, it’s a caper. If you’ve got a bud at stage two, it’s a caper berry. If you let that bud grow even more you would have a caper flower. Get it?

Good. Want to read more? Check out this article. Insider’s Tip: Use deep-fried capers as a canape garnish. Capers are delicious when deep-fried. They open up into beautiful little flowers that impart loads of flavorful salty goodness (thanks to their pickling process and their close relation to the cabbage/mustard family–Brassicaceae).

P.S. (Who knew that cabbage and mustard were in the same family?!)