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Making chilli flakes in the dehydrator

With our frosty winter coming up, I'm not sure if my chilli plants will survive, and even if they do regrow in summer, I certainly won't be harvesting chillies over winter, so I decided to try to preserve some of the extra chillies that I have harvested this season.

chillis!
I used the solid tray in my dehydrator to dry chilli flakes.  I just put 4 chillies in the blender (tops cut off and chillis cut in half, for some reason I made the mistake of putting my head over the blender and inhaling deeply to see what it smelled like, woo wee, not a good idea unless you need to clear your nostrils!), and scraped the resulting chopped chillies onto the tray (this is a very exciting success for the blender as I hate chopping chillis, you can never quite wash the hotness off your hands and then you have to be very careful where you put your fingers!).  The flakes dried over a few days (with only a couple of hours of drier operation, my strategy is to run the drier when we're at home and leave the herbs/flakes etc in the drier for a few days to air dry naturally).  I will keep making more as the chillies ripen and we will have chilli to use over winter.

More about drying herbs in the dehydrator here.

the flakes in the dehydrator
chilli flakes in the jar
Have you tried making chilli flakes?  What do you make in your dehydrator?
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Comments

  1. MeekaMay 4, 2012 at 10:52 AM

    Looks great! I've recently obtained good seed and decided to grow numerous chillis after winter so that I can make my own powder and flakes too. Your post is timely and helpful, cheers!

    ReplyDelete
  2. EmmaMay 4, 2012 at 8:40 PM

    Neat idea. I wouldn't have thought of this.

    I've still got a bag of chillis in my freezer from the one and only plant I grew 5 years ago. They still work great in recipes. (I don't use them that often as I don't have the best spice tolerance.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. JenMay 5, 2012 at 10:21 PM

    Great tip! I had always wondered how to do this. I have just been buying mine. Now I can use the ones from my garden! Yea!

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownMay 13, 2012 at 7:29 PM

    thanks for the comments, hope it works, I should have said that if you don't have a dehydrator, you could just try chopping the chillies and spreading them on a tray to dry, even put them in the oven after baking something else (with oven turned off).

    ReplyDelete
  5. Kirsty @ Bowerbird BlueMay 21, 2012 at 12:32 AM

    ahhh, now I know what to do with those chillies, thanks

    ReplyDelete

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