White Pepper
Also known as Piper nigrum, poivre blanc, weisser Pfeffer, pepe bianco, pimienta blanca
The same berry as black pepper, ripened and hulled rather than picked green and dried. Chosen in pale sausages because it seasons without speckling, and it does not taste the same as black.
White pepper and black pepper come from the same plant, Piper nigrum. The difference is when the berry is picked and what happens to it afterwards. Black pepper is the unripe green berry, dried whole, so the dark wrinkled skin stays on. White pepper is the ripe berry with that skin removed, traditionally by soaking the berries in water for a week or more until the outer layer rots away, then drying the pale inner seed.
That retting is the reason the two taste different, and anyone who treats them as interchangeable will notice. Black pepper carries most of its aromatic character in the skin, so it is fruity, resinous and bright. White pepper has lost that layer and gained a distinctly fermented, faintly barnyard note from the soak, over a cleaner and in some ways sharper heat. Both owe their pungency to piperine, which sits in the seed, so white pepper is not milder in bite; it is only quieter in aroma. In a delicate sausage that fermented edge is an asset, and in a robust one it can taste stale.
The practical reason for choosing it is visual. Any pale product, a weisswurst, a boudin blanc, a Gelbwurst, a fine cooked ham sausage, is judged partly on the cleanness of its cut face, and black specks read as a defect even though they are only pepper. White pepper seasons the same emulsion without marking it. This is why the German fine scalded sausages, the French white boudins and most poultry and veal preparations are seasoned with white rather than black.
Dosing follows the same logic as black pepper, typically 1 to 3 g per kilo of meat, with the fine emulsions at the lower end where the texture is smooth and the seasoning has nowhere to hide. Like all ground spices it fades, and pre-ground white pepper goes dusty and characterless faster than most because so much of what is left is volatile. Buy it whole where the grinder allows it.
One small point of craft: white pepper is often specified in a recipe purely for appearance, and the cook who has only black in the cupboard can usually proceed. The sausage will taste marginally brighter and it will be speckled. Where the recipe is a named traditional product judged on its cut face, that substitution is a change worth declaring rather than making quietly.