Pickled Peppers

Can you read that without thinking about the nursery rhyme? Peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers…

Well you can call me Peter Piper I guess, because we sure have put up a “peck of pickled peppers”. We really like them. We tried them first two years ago with some peppers we got at our local nursery. They were called Mariachi peppers, and are a variety of Santa Fe peppers. They were supposed to be mildly spicy with thick walls. They start green then turn yellow and then orange to red, but are ripe at any stage after green. They grew well and were really pretty. We were not sure what to do with them at first but tried pickling them and we were so happy with the results that we ate through our supply and planned on planting more the next year.

Last year we couldn’t find them though. Sad day. Maybe we were late getting to the nursery or they just didn’t plant them. Whatever the reason, we were not able to get any and we were so disappointed.

This year we tried ordering seeds and planting them under a grow light. We were unsuccessful at that attempt. But we did learn from our mistakes. I could write an entire post on that learning experience. But I’ll wait until we are successful. I’ll keep you posted.

tomato seeds sprouting — Just a few sprouts poking up, but then they died. 🙁

The first time we went to our favorite nursery they were sold out of Mariachis and we weren’t sure if we would get any of the new batch they had started. We were able to find some varieties of Santa Fe’s at our local Lowe’s and at Walmart, which we bought.

Well, it turned out that we were able to get Mariachi’s from the nursery but of course they all came in packs of 4 or 6. And since we had gone without the year before, we were a bit anxious that we wouldn’t have enough. Well, you may have already guessed where this is going…but, yeah, we ended up buying, I think, 12 pepper plants of different Santa Fe varieties. Plus we also had some Jalapeno plants. I think we ended up with 6 of those. So yeah, lots of peppers.

I didn’t get enough good pictures of them growing apparently, but this one I like a lot. I will try to get better ones next time. We will probably scale back next year. Just a bit. Maybe.

Okay, I am getting to the part where I tell you what we actually did with the peppers. But aren’t they pretty?

Pickling peppers is actually really easy. It is even easier than pickling cucumbers. It is essentially the same process, (you can read my post on Sweet and Spicy cucumber pickles here). You slice the peppers, pack them in jars, pour hot brine over them and process them in a steamer or water bath canner according to safe canning regulations.

Here it all is in bullet list form: (Tip: wear gloves, trust me on that one)

Prepare jars and lids
Wash peppers
Slice peppers
Mix brine and bring to a boil
Rinse peppers (optional, to remove some of the seeds)
Sort by color (also totally optional, just for appearance)
Pack in jars, as tight as you can pack them
Add spices to each jar
Pour brine over the top
Wipe rims, cover with lids and rings
Process (For me, with the steam canner at 4,000 ft above sea level it was 20 minutes)

I really recommend wearing gloves when you are cutting and handling spicy peppers. Trust me. Tyler and I both chopped peppers a few weeks ago, and forgot to wear gloves, thinking we could just wash our hands. We both had burning fingers all the rest of the day. We tried a bunch of ideas Tyler found online for reducing pepper burns too, and nothing really worked but time. It was no fun. At least we were smart enough to know not to touch our eyes. Don’t try that either. I am sure you can imagine.

I like to slice them the with my mandolin slicer. The same one I use for cucumbers. Except that I use the flat blade for peppers and the wavy blade for cucumbers.

This is our handy mandolin slicer. We use it for all kinds of things. Look at all the seeds though. That’s why we usually rinse the peppers after we slice them.

Once we get them all sliced we like to rinse them to remove the majority of the seeds. Otherwise we end up with a big pile of seeds in the bottom of the jar. These peppers were spicy enough that rinsing them made my eyes water and I started coughing like crazy. That was a new experience. It made me a little afraid to taste them. But once they were pickled they were just the right level of spicy.

A mandolin slicer helps make the cuts even, but it isn’t really a requirement.

Once they are sliced you just have to pack them into your sanitized jars. I recommend packing them in as tight as you can so you don’t end up with wasted space. Your brine will also go further that way.

Sometimes we get ambitious and sort them by color so we can layer them like this picture below. I love it!

Sometimes we don’t have enough of red or orange. Especially the ones we picked right before the freeze. We knew it was going to get cold enough to freeze everything so we just went out and picked everything that was even remotely yellow. So, needless to say, we ended up with a lot of yellow peppers. They all taste great though. And they seem to all be spicy.

Here is the recipe for 7 quarts, which uses about 3-4 gallons of peppers:

7 cups water
4 cups apple cider vinegar
3 cups white vinegar
3.5 cups white sugar
6 tsp of pickling salt

Bring to a boil and stir until the sugar and salt are dissolved. Keep hot until ready to pour over peppers.

Per Jar:

1 clove garlic (1/2 tsp diced)
1tsp canola oil
1/4 tsp pickle crisp

Pour the brine over the spices and peppers. Whip the rims, put the lids and rings on and process them. That’s it! Easy right?! Go try it and let me know if you have any questions.

If you have a small batch you can just refrigerate them until you are ready to eat them, though I recommend waiting 24 hours at least before eating them. They will last quite a long time in the fridge. We eat them on nachos, burgers, but them in bean dip, there are all kinds of possibilities.

If you try it leave a comment and let me know how it went. Happy Pickling!