How To Dehydrate Your Peppers To Keep Them Longer

Ingredients:

20 serrano peppers or other peppers you have on hand

Tools needed:

Dehydrator or very low temperature oven (170-190 F)

Colender

Clean kitchen towel

Nitrile gloves

How to make it:

This process is SUPER easy to do and all it takes is time and patience on your part. Wearing rubber gloves is recommended when handling hot peppers.

Wash peppers and let air dry. Place the peppers in your dehydrator. If you don’t have one, you can heat your oven to its lowest temperature. Mine goes to 190 F and the peppers took around 1-1/2 hours to dry out. Be careful if you use your oven as the peppers can possibly burn before they dry. I propped my door open slightly to reduce the heat by a few degrees, it makes a difference. Of course, drying times may vary.

I set my dehydrator to 158 F, which is a weird temperature, I know. It is a cheap dehydrator, but it does the job. Really, set the temperature around 140-170 for the best results. Dehydrating times will vary. For my serranos, I kept them whole. They took around 14 hours to dehydrate. I turned them over half way through the dehydrating time. I started checking on the peppers after the 8 hour mark to see how far along they were in the processs. Use your senses. If you’re dehydrating larger peppers, you can cut them into coins or in half lengthwise. You can remove the seeds and placenta if you choose to do so. Obviously, different peppers and sizes will take more or less time. The peppers will be dried out completely when ready and shriveled up. If you try to bend the peppers, they will most likely break.

Once the peppers are dehydrated, I like to store mine in an empty mason jar with a good sealing lid. When I want a dehydrated pepper, I grab a pepper or two, chop it up and sprinkle on salads, sandwiches or pizza. You can choose to rehydrate them, which I show in this hot sauce recipe. You can go as far as grinding the peppers up in a spice grinder and use the pepper powder in a seasoned salt or spice rub.

The dehydrated peppers will stay good for a very long time in a good sealing mason jar or a good sealed bag, say 6 months to a year. I like to use my vacuum sealer if I am storing larger amounts of peppers.

Enjoy

Logan