Hot peppers are always great to have at hand, especially if you’ve grown them yourself. If you find yourself having too much at hand, you may want to preserve them for a later stage or play around with the ideas of preservation. So what do you do with tons of hot peppers at your disposal? Well, there are many ways to preserve and enjoy peppers long after the peak growing season has passed.
Preserving hot chilli peppers
Drying your peppers
Drying peppers offers you a low-tech technique for preserving. Air-drying is particularly well-suited for the skinned variety of peppers. With the more juicy peppers, like jalapenos, dehydrators should be used to avoid them getting mouldy before their moisture evaporates when air drying. You can use your dried chilli peppers to create homemade hot pepper products.
Freeze the peppers
Although not very popular, you can freeze hot peppers, and they will still retain their heat just fine. They are actually a great option for freezing because they keep their colour without the added step of needing to be blanched first, unlike many other vegetables. You can also crank up their hot flavour up a notch by roasting and peeling them before popping them into the deep freeze.
Pickling them
Pickling is a great way to make your hot pepper crop production last. Just halve or slice your peppers and drop them into a pot of boiling water for 2 minutes to soften them up, and just like that, you have a jar of pickled peppers. Cool, cover them and refrigerate for up to 3 weeks. You can use them in drinks, chop them up on tacos, or use them as a salad garnish for that extra flavour. Any hot pepper will work. The technique is one of the easiest and quickest ways to dispatch a large number of peppers in your harvest.
Written by CHUMASANDE MATIWANE
First published on Garden & Home
Also see: The weight loss magic of black pepper
