Long-term food porn

At times, the bounty of the garden exceeds the capacity of the stomach. Fresh produce is, above all, a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. You have to cook it, eat it, preserve it or toss it. Usually, things like beans, peas, strawberries, and such aren't a problem, especially with two families eating them, as is the case with our growing project. Also, neighbors can find themselves the beneficiaries of a bountiful harvest. Potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots -- these things last a while, even after harvest, allowing demand to catch up to supply.

Still, there are times when spoilage threatens, particularly with crops like tomatoes, beans, zucchini and peppers, which have a bad habit of producing at a tremendous pace once they start to come in. We've already dealt with how to handle and over-supply of zucchini: make bread, people, then freeze it or give it away. Today, we deal with the problem of peppers. Not bell peppers, which have been more sparse this year (I have a method of dealing with those, as well, but I have to have a lot of them to demonstrate it here. Maybe next year.) but hot peppers.

This year, we planted a variety of peppers, including jalapenos, habaneros, banana peppers and some long, green string-bean looking ones whose name escapes me. They are varying degrees of hot. You can preserve these one of two ways: pickling, which I have in the past found dissatisfying -- Peter Piper may have picked a peck of pickled peppers, but they what the fuck did he do with them? Yeah, I don't know, either -- or drying. This post deals with drying.

If you have a food dehydrator -- I do, but it was busy this weekend -- you can dry your peppers in that, but it takes longer. The method I used, totally valid, is to dry peppers in the oven at low temperature. Still takes a good while -- about 12 hours at 200 degrees F -- but the method should be available to everyone. Side note: Yes, you can make chili powder this way, but only if you grew enough chili peppers. The pepper I am producing here is more generic hot pepper, for use in spicy foods, Mexican food, etc. You can add it to chili to turn up the heat, but this is not chili powder, per se.

Anyway, get a broiling pan with the rack, so that air can circulate under the peppers. Place your peppers on the pan thusly:

Yes, I dried more peppers than that. This is just a sampling. Anyway, set your oven temp at 200, put the peppers in, and check back in after about 8 hours. Could take up to 12 hours, but start checking at 8. As peppers become crispy, take them out. Not all peppers will dry at the same rate. When it's done, you'll have a bunch of dried peppers that look like this:

Now, you will need a mortar and pestle. Everybody has one, right? Jeez.

You will take your dried peppers, remove the stems by pinching off the top of the pepper -- this should also pull most of the seeds out for you, as well. Crunch those suckers up and put them in the bowl of the mortar -- or the pestle, whichever it is. (I kid -- the mortar is the bowl.)

Grind that crap like your life depends on it or, as Xavier used to say, work that sucker to death:

When that sucker is worked, it looks like this:

This pepper is hot; don't touch your eyes or mouth, morons. Store it in an airtight jar -- a mason jar works, or one of those funky jars with the hinge, rubber seal and clamping mechanism. You know what I'm talking about. Anyway, you want something hot, throw this pepper in. It lasts forever.