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.
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| 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.
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| the flakes in the dehydrator |
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| chilli flakes in the jar
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Have you tried making chilli flakes? What do you make in your dehydrator?
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!
ReplyDeleteNeat idea. I wouldn't have thought of this.
ReplyDeleteI'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.)
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!
ReplyDeletethanks 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).
ReplyDeleteahhh, now I know what to do with those chillies, thanks
ReplyDelete