Learn How To Dehydrate Hot Peppers (Preserve the Harvest)
Dehydrating is a fantastic and easy way to preserve your homegrown or farmers’ market purchased produce. People have been practicing the art of drying their foods since 10,000BC. If you are not familiar with dehydrating, then it is the process of removing water from any food source.
Dehydrating Methods
There are several different ways to dehydrate. You can sundry, which is using the heat from the sun. Electric convection dehydrators, which is a large kitchen appliance that uses electricity to heat and move air around to dry food. This is the method I prefer and use often. Then there is the use of a household oven. Freeze drying, infrared drying, spray drying, and microwave vacuum drying are some other forms. I don’t know much about those last practices.
Food that Dehydrates
You can dry out almost all food grown from a tree, bush, plant, or grown in the ground. One of my most homegrown produce is my peppers. We grow several types of peppers for all our needs and wants; like jalapeno, cayenne, bell, Thai, paprika, and peppadew piquante peppers.
I love to dehydrate cayenne and paprika peppers and turn them into powders for cooking. I had found out that the paprika powder bought in stores can be cut with other spices. So it pays to make your own and get pure paprika spices. I also like to grow a variety of paprika peppers, mild and hot, and then combine to make my unique blend, which no one else has.
I dehydrate using two methods, electric dehydrator or by the sun. Now I don’t typically like to dehydrate any peppers using the electric dehydrator because there is a lot of handling of peppers, which always seems to be a bad idea. I seem to touch something that causes burning on my face. So instead I string up my peppers and hang them to dry on either the outside or inside.
Step by Step Instructions
First, pick your ripe produce then clean all the peppers. I like to use a baking soda and water bath for my produce. Fill up the sink half full and add 1/4 cup baking soda. Let the peppers sit for 10 minutes, dunking and rotating the peppers, and you will see all the dirt fall to the bottom of the sink. Take out the peppers and dry off.
Now, begin sewing together the peppers using a sharp needle and thread. Thread the needle with a good amount of sewing thread; any will do and knot the bottom. Pierce the base of the pepper stem, as seen in the photo. Be sure to pierce the middle of the stem because when it starts to dry it will shrivel and become smaller. The thread may fall out otherwise.
Push the peppers down the thread to a knot at the bottom. Keep this up with the rest of your peppers until you either come close to the end of your thread or you run out of peppers. I like to make sure I leave enough thread at the top to tie a loop so that I can hang the peppers properly to dry.
Remember, the larger the pepper, the longer it will take to dry. My cayenne peppers can take up to a month to air dry but larger paprika peppers nearly two months.
Once the peppers are crispy dry, I remove the string and their green stem. I put them in a food mill or grinder and make a powder, even grinding up the seeds. And don’t forget to use gloves when handling peppers in all states.
