Reporting
Ají Dulce: The Taste of Home That Refused to Disappear
Across farms in Maryland and New York, a small, fragrant pepper has become a uniting thread for the Venezuelan diaspora.
The reporting
Irena Stein grows the most essential ingredient in Venezuelan cooking 2,000 miles from where it belongs. She owns Alma Cocina Latina, Baltimore’s only Venezuelan restaurant, and since 2023 she has farmed a donated plot at Emory Knoll Farms, North America’s first green roof nursery, to raise ají dulce in Maryland soil.
I went to see it in September 2025, during the second harvest. What I found wasn’t just a crop. It was an archive of memory.
Hundreds of miles north, two Venezuelan women were unknowingly working toward the same goal.
When I posted a reel from that visit, I discovered Irena and chef Héctor Romero weren’t alone. Mercedes Golip had been keeping seeds her parents carried from Venezuela, growing them in her Brooklyn apartment. Dr. Gabriela Pereyra, an agronomist with a doctorate from Germany, made room for them at Yara Farms. Four hundred plants grew from those seeds.
The feature follows both routes, Maryland and New York, and the varieties that survived the journey.
Read the feature
The reels
Two reels, two halves of the same story.
REEL 01Why ají dulce matters. A pepper that barely travels became the ingredient Venezuelan cooking cannot do without. The comments filled with people who hadn’t tasted one in five, ten, eighteen years since leaving Venezuela.
REEL 02Who is growing it now. On these farms the people raising the crop are not Venezuelan themselves, and they understand exactly what it means to the people who are.
Photographs from the 2025 harvest
Photographs: Gabriela Montes de Oca
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