I have shoulder high bushes covered with tiny reddening hot peppers, grown partly for aesthetics (ploy to reconcile my husband to expanding vegetable garden). It looks like about a lifetime's worth of them, and I do hate waste.
Also have many hot banana peppers and a fair crop of serranos; I make white bean chile using some of those, and char, skin and seed these for the freezer and future soups.
Any tips for the little red ones? Canning peppers or even flavored oil seems risky. Big red botulism warnings. My great aunts kept a cruet with vinegar and red peppers on the kitchen counter, and they lived to be 100 and 102.
I think there is a limit to the number of peppers that you can use personally, so you might just have to sneak them into the Halloween treats that you distribute to the children at the end of October.
Thanks, Kerouac. (Though I generally try to avoid doing things that will land an unflattering mug shot of myself on the evening news.)
That or take them to work and leave them in the break room. Or somehow find a newly arrived Thai immigrant family that didn't have time to get a garden in this year.
Although I think Kerouac's idea of giving them as Halloween treats is the most practical, you'd still have to dry them, which sort of constitutes a recipe.
With your permission, I will move this thread to The Galley. Lemme know what you prefer.
Shouldn't you just start a new pepper recipe thread in the Galley, Bixa? After all, this thread is still "food discussion" -- we don't want to confuse people, do we? Or do we?
I had a similar dilemma one year lola ,and I saved all these small bottles and made the vinegar as mentioned and gave them to people for Christmas presents.Although, one batch was so strong a friend of mine said he used it to kill fire ant piles in his yard!
You ain't no bum, Lola! This is absolutely in the right place. I was just trying to avoid having two threads with very similar titles, plus sending people from this thread to go look at recipes in another one.
I had something similar happen to me, Casimira. I made some deadly hot sauce (recipe below ) and a friend said she simply was unable to use it, it was just too hot. Um, it's not simple enough to cut it with some vinegar, lime juice or water, or to use it as an ingredient? --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Home made HOT Sauce
This is best with thoroughly ripe red chiles.
Put them in a saucepan with a clove or two of garlic, perhaps a tiny amount of oregano, a little salt, & vinegar to cover. Boil.
Allow to cool, then blenderize the bejeezus out of it -- get it as close to a liquid as you possibly can.
Put the sauce into bottles. If you can score some of those under-sized wine bottles, they look great for gift-giving.
I keep this in the fridge, although the vinegar should act as a preservative. You can also freeze it. Don't over-fill the bottle, and let it get completely frozen before capping it.
This stuff is really far superior to any bottled sauce you've ever bought.
Here are some vinegars I've made. I'm sure others can expand on this theme.
The delicate rose hue is from purple basil. If using a herb-flavored vinegar for your pepper vinegar, be sure to strain the infused vinegar first. Basil or any other soft leaves look unpleasantly colorless later.
Either nuke clean bottles in the microwave or rinse each one with a little plain vinegar heated to boiling.
Put the amount of peppers you wish in each bottle & add a little salt. Slip in sprigs of sturdy herbs -- lemon verbena, rosemary, sage, etc. -- if using, and pour hot vinegar in to fill the bottle. Cap when cool.
Let set at least a week to let flavors develop. Peppers will sink to the bottom of the bottle as they absorb and flavor the vinegar.
Lola ~~ do you have an attic? Try a small batch of chiles first, to make sure this really works:
Spread out some paper, fabric, or screen and cover with chiles. Check daily, stirring them around. The heat in the attic should dry them very quickly.
You can now either grind them (a laugh a minute!), or leave them whole. If ground, you can mix them with other stuff to make chili powder. If whole, you can put in jars or even in little bags tied at the top a la rice-to-throw-at-weddings. You can give the bags as is, or tie them to other stuff, such as your bottles of pepper vinegar.
You can also roam the neighborhood at night, surreptitiously flinging the peppers into the shrubbery of people who annoy you. What a surprise when all those little plants come up like gangbusters in the Spring!
I refined this recipe years & years ago and have made it innumerable times.
Bixa's Best Hot Pepper Jelly
-- At least 1 ½ (one and one-half) cup of whole chiles, more or less depending on hotness of chiles &/or hotness desired. Pad out amount with a non-hot pepper, using ultimate desired flavor as a guide. If using datil peppers (my favorite – a relative of the habanero), banana peppers would be a good companion, with just a couple of small red peppers (hot) added for the color contrast. Cut peppers lengthwise and flick out seeds and ribs with a sharp knife. (you don’t have to do a great job) Chop coarsely.
-- a couple of ribs, or several blades of lemon grass, chopped
-- @ 5 cloves of garlic, or to taste
-- 1 ½ cups cider vinegar
-- 1 teaspoon popcorn salt
-- 6 ½ cups sugar
-- ½ teaspoon butter (reduces foaming)
-- 2 pouches Certo liquid pectin (comes in a 6 oz. box containing 2 pouches)
Put first five ingredients (peppers, lemon grass, garlic, vinegar, and salt) into a large stainless steel or enameled pot.
Bring mixture to a boil and let simmer, covered, for 10 minutes. Remove from heat.
Strain the liquid into a large measuring cup and put the solids through a food mill.
Discard the stuff that won’t go through the mill – it will be mostly shreds of lemon grass and skin & seeds of peppers.
Measure the milled goop and the reserved liquid – together they should make up 3 cups. Make up the difference with water, wine, sherry, &/or vinegar. (NOTE: be ware of using more than a teensy bit of vinegar, or you could wind up with hot pepper super-balls instead of jelly.)
Return mixture to pot, and thoroughly stir in sugar. Add butter & bring to a rolling boil. Boil for one minute, then stir in pectin. Boil for one more minute. Remove from heat & skim. Ladle into sterilized jars and seal with paraffin. ======================================================= Jars & sealing: Use any combination of saved jars, or seven 8 oz. jelly jars. Wash jars well, drain, then turn them upside down in microwave and nuke until no water remains in them. (at least three minutes, depending on brand of microwave)
Have them setting on a pizza pan or lazy susan next to stove. If using found jars, have a couple too many to enhance the chance of jelly getting totally used up.
To ladle jelly from pot into jars, use a normal-size soup ladle and a funnel. This seems to keep dribbles to a minimum. When all jars are full, put on paraffin.
Meanwhile, have paraffin melting. I use an empty tuna can setting in a pan of water. About ¾ of a rectangle of Gulf brand paraffin is enough for this recipe. Pick up tuna tin with needle-nosed pliers and use a soup spoon to dip out hot paraffin & drizzle it onto the hot jelly in the jars.
When paraffin cools to white, invert jars onto a rack and let them continue cooling undisturbed. When they are totally cool, screw on lids.
I love that kind of vinegar & use it on greens, in salads, on beans, even in some soups. Keep a bottle on the table and see what your family comes up with.
About the above recipe -- skip the seed-flicking step if you're using the birdseye peppers. They're too teeny to fool with that way.
I need to dig up my Corazon de Suegra(?) recipe for hot sauce. Bixa ,why if using thoroughly ripe red chiles is the sauce green in #12? Your photos of the vinegars are gorgeous. I have tons of great bottles I've hoarded. This is inspiring.Thanks.
That's because I only have the green sauce left -- used or gave away all the red sauce.
Not to air my dirty linen in public, but there is a story behind that green sauce.
I had quite a few chile parado plants and made the most beautiful, delicious red sauce with the ripe peppers.
Well, then they got some kind of plague and I wanted to pull the plants up, but they were still covered with unripe chiles. Making sauce with them would be fine, except that chile parados are black when they're unripe.
Well, I proceeded anyway, and wound up with the hottest sauce I ever tasted -- good, but insanely hot. It was also the nastiest color you could imagine so I used food coloring in it.
The red sauce turns out milder because the chiles are ripe, and the color is really red and rich and natural.
Serendipity -- the book* fell open at this page when I was looking for something else. I quote:
Chiltepin Ice Cream (Lola's little peppers are chiltepines)
This novelty was first served in 1988 for the symposium on wild chiles at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix and at the Fiesta de los Chiles at the Tucson Botanical Gardens. It is very hot (despite the tendency of ice cream to cut the head), so you may want to reduce the quantity of chiltepines.
1/3 cup chiltepines en escabeche, thoroughly rinsed, pulverized, or substitute fresh green or dried red pods 1 gallon vanilla ice cream
Combine all ingredients and mix thoroughly in a blender until pepper flecks appear throughout the ice cream. Serve in small portions.
Yield: 1 quart [sic]
They give this their hottest rating. I don't know how 1 gallon would reduce to one quart, but suspect the gallon is a misprint. Also, the blender seems to be the wrong appliance for this -- I'd use a food processor.
My own version is chocolate ice cream with cayenne pepper sprinkled on, then stirred in.
![[Home]](http://static1.grsites.com/user/folders/nowdocking/r3920049/button23550481.png "[Home]")
![[New Topics]](http://images.proboards.com/menu/topics.png "[New Topics]")
![[Help]](http://static1.grsites.com/user/folders/nowdocking/r3920083/button28195714.png "[Help]")
![[Search]](http://static1.grsites.com/user/folders/nowdocking/r3920086/button25710789.png "[Search]")
![[Login]](http://static1.grsites.com/user/folders/nowdocking/r3920112/button20487816.png "[Login]")
![[Register]](http://static1.grsites.com/user/folders/nowdocking/r3920117/button97266159.png "[Register]")
) and a friend said she simply was unable to use it, it was just too hot. Um, it's not simple enough to cut it with some vinegar, lime juice or water, or to use it as an ingredient?![[image]](http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/9119/hardwarestoreaug3109003.jpg "[image]")
![[image]](http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/9709/vinegars002fc4.jpg "[image]")
![[image]](http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/6122/chileparadoif0.jpg "[image]")