October 10, 2005
GOT A BUMPER CROP OF CHILES… NOW WHAT? DEHYDRATE ‘EM!
The good news is that you've got a huge bumper crop of chiles. But what to do with them?
I grew a Peter Pepper plant this summer that grew four feet tall and yielded about 250 peppers. Similarly, my Firecracker Pequin plant had 80-90 chiles on it at its peak, and they mostly ripened at about the same time. Like most vegetables, it can be feast or famine with a chile crop. So how can you preserve some of these tasty morsels for those cold January days when you've got a craving for some atomic heat chili?
One idea is to buy a food dehydrator. What a food dehydrator does, basically, is circulate low temperature heat around food (in our case chiles) with the result being that it pulls all of the moisture out of the food. Dehydrating is quick, its SUPER easy, and its pretty inexpensive.
The process for dehydrating takes just a couple of hours, based on the size of your chiles, and here’s how you do it:
- Snip the stems completely off to allow the warm air into the chile, making sure that the inside of the chile is exposed. This significantly speeds up the dehydration process.
- Lay the chiles in a single layer distributed evenly around the dehydrator tray.
- Set the temperature to about 135 degrees and turn on the dehydrator.
- Check them every hour or so to see how their doing. Remove chiles from the dehydrator when they feel stiff.
Once dehydrated, chiles keep all of their flavor and all of their heat, and I use them in one of three ways: (1) reconsitute them by placing them in a bowl, covering them with a cup of boiling water and letting them steep for about 20 minutes, (2) store them in an airtight container and just crumble them into a recipe as needed, or (3) powderize them in a spice grinder and store in an airtight shaker.
A quality food dehydrator will only run you about $40-50. As “infomercial-ish” as the name sounds, I use the SnackMaster Pro dehydrator (pictured on the left) from American Harvest. The stackable racks in this model allowing you load it up with a considerable amount of chiles. And it cleans up easily.
Enjoy!
Scott@urbanChiles.com
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