This year I have the most bountiful harvest of hot peppers I have ever had. One plant each of jalapeno, habanero, wax, serrano, and a round red cherry-type pepper, and I probably picked 100 individual peppers off the plants today, with an equal amount still on the plants, and potential frosts a week or so away.
What can I do with all these peppers? Do they freeze well?
Pickle them!! Then you can say you have a peck of pickled peppers.
I’ve been smoking my habaneros. Some of them I’ll save, the others are going to be ground up into powder and put into a shaker.
Dry them and make hot sauces.
You can dry them for later grinding, or adding to stews and soups.
Bring them over to the Grilled Cheesethread. We’ll have lunch!
Is there a thread about drinks somewhere here?
Perhaps you can grind them up and freeze them for later use, like you can do with garlic?
Another vote for hot sauce! I put that shit on everything.
Hot sauce is super easy to make, and you can customize it to your desired heat level.
I just made my first ever batch of hot sauce, using an excess of cayenne peppers I grew this year. It’s insanely easy:
Hold the hot peppers by their stems, and snip them with a scissors into a saucepan. This way you won’t get any pepper juice on your fingers. Barely cover the cut-up peppers with vinegar; I used apple cider vinegar. Add a big pinch of salt. Simmer the peppers and vinegar, covered, for one-half hour. Whir up the mixture in a blender, adding water until it’s of the consistency you like. Keep your face away from the mouth of the blender when you open the lid to check!
Pour the mixture through a sieve, pressing on the solids with a silicon spatula to squeeze out all the sauce. Taste it and add salt if you want. Bottle it up in an old ketchup bottle and keep it in the fridge.
I can’t believe how much better this tastes than Tabasco or Sam’s Red-Hot sauce.
You can also use hot peppers for a homemade organic insecticide.
Be careful though - I once tried this, and the gaseous efflux from the blender took about an hour to clear, during which time the kitchen was uninhabitable.
I’ve made pickled peppers, very pretty in a big glass jar, red, yellow and green.
Peppers can be frozen. I just bought a peck a peppers last week, sweet peppers I thought, red, orange, and green. I seeded them and cut them up, put them on a tray in the freezer, and then put in baggies. So later I’m sitting there and…my fingers started…burning? Yes, my fingers started burning! There was a hot pepper hiding in there, incognito!
Heh, I guess it’s a pepper day.
Cool ideas! I think I’ll try a hot sauce (with appropriate eye/throat protection).
How does one dry them? I imagine super-low heat in the oven maybe?
Freeze 'em. I do all of the above. I dry some (in a dehydrator), freeze some, make some into hot sauce. Got a pretty sweet yield this year: Trinidad scorpions, ghost peppers, mustard habaneros, Scotch bonnets, Thai reds, rooster spurs, fataliis (my favorite of the bunch), etc.
They DO freeze beautifully. It doesn’t look like you have any varieties that need to be roasted and peeled (Poblano, New Mex, Anaheim, for example), but roasting, peeling, and freezing works very well, too. We just returned from Santa Fe, where they were roasting hundreds of pounds of green hatch chilis in parking lots all over town. I bought about 20 pounds of roasted green hatch chilis, Fed Ex’ed them to myself, peeled them and froze them. Now I’ll have green hatch chilis all winter. Yum!
I’ve made this Hungarian goulash recipe - it calls for Hungarian wax chilis, which I think your wax peppers would probably sub nicely for. It’s really nice, spicy but not too much heat.
They do freeze well and you can make hot pepper jam.
Recipe:
About 2 cups of chopped hot peppers, deseeded if you feel like bothering
1 TBS of lemon juice
about 3/4 cup of water
1 packet of pectin, I like Certo liquid pectin
7 cups of sugar
Bring hot peppers, water and lemon juice to a gentle boil in a large saucepan. Stir in sugar gradually until completely dissolved and gently boiling. Add pectin to full boil, let boil one minute, remove from heat. Ladle into sterilized canning jars, seal, and boil in canner for five minutes.
We have a few jalapenos on one plant and my husband is talking about making salsa. Anybody have any recipes or good ideas to share? Then would it be better to freeze or can it, to keep it for later?
You could dig up that plant, put it in a pot and bring it indoors. The peppers will stay good ‘on the vine’ for a while, and the plant may produce more through the winter.
For fresh salsa - Fresh tomatoes, hot peppers, onion, garlic, any other veggies you want, cilantro, salt, a bit of sugar, and lime to taste in a food processor. Process to desired consistency. IMO fresh salsa is best the second day, so make it ahead of time.
For salsa you want to keep a while and freeze or can, substitute stewed tomatoes for fresh. You can make your own. First peel the tomatoes by boiling for a minute and then shocking them in cold water. Then quarter them and place in a saucepan with salt, bring to boil, simmer low for 20-30 min. Obviously since you are adding salt in this step you would add less when you add the other ingredients.