Candying is one of the most ancient forms of preserving the harvest.  When chillies are placed into a syrup and the sugar content is gradually increased, the pods cell liquid gets replaced by sugar.  This migration through semipermeable cell walls is also called osmosis.  Typically, 70 to 75 percent of the extracted cell liquid, mostly water, will be replaced by sugar, while shape, colour, and a good portion of the flavour will be preserved.  That way candied chillies will keep almost indefinitely.  The ways you can use these sweet peppers are almost limitless, and the same is true for a by-product of the process spicy syrup.

The process for candied chillies

Warning: candying chillies is not for the impatient

The process spreads over 6 days, taking about 30 minutes every day, not counting the time taken to clean up pots and utensils.  So take your time and allow this to be a fun project.

What you will need

Medium-sized saucepan

Wooden spoon

Mason jar (1 litre) or similar glass container with lid

Small glass bowl that just fits into the opening of the jar, to hold down the chillies in the liquid

One or two clean marmalade jars and lids

Heat resistant strainer

500ml jars to keep excess syrup

Cookie cooling rack

Baking over or electric dehydrator

Old newspapers to put under pots and jars

Ingredients

350 grams of fresh chillies rinsed and cut in half or strips

1.2 kgs of regular white sugar

1 litre of water

The process for candied chillies

Day 1.

Start by preparing the peppers.  As with all preserving techniques, use only the fresh spotless chillies.  Rinse and pat dry.  Cut the pods of thin-walled varieties such as habanero, cayenne, or Thai chillies in half to ease the syrup penetration, and deseed them.  Fleshier chillies like Jalapenos are better cut into strips.  Keep sections of chillies uniformed in size for each batch.

The syrup

In a large saucepan, combine the litre of water and 1kg of sugar.  Using a wooden spoon, mix well, then bring to a rolling boil (lots of bubbling).  Keep boiling and stirring until the mixture takes on a syrupy consistency but still stays clear and colourless.  This takes about 30 minutes.  If you are using a ceramic stove top watch out not to spill any of the syrup on it, as this stuff burns in fast.

Put the cut chillies in the mason jar or other glass container and pour the boiling hot syrup over them.  Leave enough room to put a small bowl as a weight on top to keep the chillies down under the syrup.  Close the container and keep the remaining syrup in marmalade jar(s).   let the chillies sit in the closed container for 24 hours.  To minimise spillage and mess place newspaper underneath your jars.

NOTE: It is easier to clean the pots and utensils before they cool down.

Day 2.

On the second day, drain the chillies in a strainer, letting the syrup flow into your saucepan.  Put the chillies back into the glass container.

Bring the syrup to a boil and stir in an additional 50 grams of sugar.  Add also the syrup you saved in the marmalade jars.  Keep boiling at high heat and stirring with your wooden spoon for about 10 minutes.  Pour the hot syrup over the chillies again and put the weight on them to keep them all covered in the liquid.  Save the remaining syrup again.  Let the chillies sit in their closed container for another 24 hours.

Day 3 to day 6.

Repeat the second day’s procedure on days 3, 4, and 5, including the addition of 50 grams more sugar every day.  Both the sugar addition and the reduction by cooking will cause the syrup to become thicker and thicker.  As well it will be getting hotter as some of the capsaicin will dissolve into the syrup from the chillies.  After day 5 let the chillies sit for 48 hours – day six you can have a rest.

Day 7.

Pour the syrup and chillies into a saucepan and bring to a brief boil for just 1 minute, then take off the heat.  Drain the chillies through the strainer and catch the syrup in jars.  There are great uses for the sticky spicy liquid as well.

Arrange the chillies on a cookie cooling rack, be sure to put newspaper underneath to catch drips of excess syrup.  Let them sit for 2 hours.

Finish the sticky pieces off in the over or a dehydrator (4 hours in the dehydrator). In the oven drying should take about 15 minutes at 120 degrees Celsius with the door slightly open.  Check after 10 minutes, and the drying should be finished no later than another 10 to 15 minutes. (To keep the peppers as they are, the airflow and lower temperature offered by a dehydrator works best.)

Let the chillies cool to room temperature, store them in an airtight container.  Flat containers like Tupperware or glassware allow you to place the pieces side by side rather than stacking them and potentially having them sticking together.  If the chillies are still a little sticky, you can coat them with powdered sugar (also called confectioner’s sugar).

Ideas and inspiration on using your candied chillies

• Spice up fruitcake, muffins, and other cakes
• Add to a cheese cake
• Decorate cakes, ice cream
• Cover in chocolate and enjoy a spicy snack

Suggestions for the syrup

• Sweeten tea or hot chocolate
• Use in cocktails
• Pour over waffles or pancakes
• Add to caramels, or butterscotch

Do you want to give this a try?  Exotic chillies have made it easy just download the PDF doc of this blog and print.

 (download printable pdf)

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Chillies have unbelievable benefits for health. Chillies can improve your digestive system and lower the level of blood sugar in the body. Apart from those healthy reasons, chillies simply spice up your meals. People preserve chillies because they ripen easily. One handy technique to preserve chillies is to freeze them.

For chilli heads that grow chillies may find that ripening those chillies will take a lot of space and you will end up with too many of them in the baskets. The best way to store the chillies without deteriorating them is to freeze them. The best time to freeze your chillies is before they are ripe.

A few simple ways of freezing chillies

Prepared chillies

Freezing chillies does not mean directly store them in a vacuumed plastic and keep them in the freezer. You may as well prepare the chillies before they go to your refrigerator. To prepare chillies, all you need is to cut the stalks. The seeds must also be removed including the membranes. You can slice the leave or chop it into smaller pieces.
Place the chops on a steel tray (used for baking); let it cold and dry in the freezer (just dry them out but don’t freeze them yet). After half an hour, check the chillies and pick one to check if it is firm enough. When it is firmed, pick your polythene bags and put them inside. Try to insert a small amount of chillies per bag.

There are practical reasons behind these steps:

• Firming the small pieces will not let the chilli sticks to each other during freezing.
• You can use them without opening the whole packages and keep the other packs well preserved.
• You can simply thaw them in a pan and cook them without having to chop them.

Whole chillies

Another way to preserve chillies by freezing them is to put the whole chillies in a plastic container. Before freezing the chillies in whole, you need to make sure that the chillies are dry. If you grow your own plants and using no pesticides, there is no need to clean the chillies before storing. Yup, it’s as simple as that!

Ice cubed chillies

Another alternative to freeze chillies is to put it in the ice cube tray after chopped. It is a neat way to preserve chillies. Once you put them in the ice cube trays, pour water into the tray and leave it to freeze just like you make ice cubes. This idea helps to separate chillies from sticking together. Once they are completely frozen, take the cubes from the trays and put it inside a plastic bag. Need to use it? Simply take one or two cubes of the chillies and thaw them!

Vacuumed Roasted chillies

If you don’t have home grown chilli plants, you can still obtain roasted chillies from the market and preserve them. As soon as you get home, immediately unpack the chillies from the plastic wrap. Chillies are the type of veggies that will quickly grow bacteria when left untreated.

If you plan to chop them, make sure you are using latex gloves to save your fingers skins from burning. Remember, only use high quality storage bags when preserving crops and plants! You can either remove the stems or leave them there. It depends on your own preference. But for practical reasons mentioned on the above paragraphs, you might want to chop them first. Make sure that the air is sucked out from the bags before they go into the freezer. The best way is to store 5 chillies in one bag. If you want to use them for cooking, you can take out a bag.

Chillies can develop mould easily. Thus, it is recommended to put as small amount as possible. You can determine the likelihood of using chillies per cooking- before you pack them. The methods can be used for green chillies or red chillies. And with the correct preservation, these chillies can be available for all year around! There are many creative ways to preserve chillies other than freezing them. Weather to freeze them or to dry them out; whichever you choose, make sure you get the most of your chillies!

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The Cayenne Chilli Pepper

No one seems to know the origin of the cayenne pepper. Although it was named after the Cayenne River in French Guiana.  Some speculate that the Portuguese may have transferred it to Europe, then into Africa and India, where it appears today in many forms.  The plants are almost treelike, with multiple steams and an erect habit, growing up to a meter tall and sixty centimetres wide. The leaves are smooth, and medium green, about seven centimetres wide and five centimetres long.  For most cayennes, the pods are pendant, long and slender.  Measuring up to twenty five centimetres long and two centimetres wide.  A mature plant can easily produce forty pods. The cayenne is considered hot measuring between 30,000 and 50,000 SHUs.  The cayenne pepper is grown commercially in New Mexico, Louisiana, Africa, India, Japan, and Mexico.

The Serrano Chilli Pepper

This pod type probably originated in the mountains of northern Puebla and Hildago, Mexico; serrano means “from the highland or mountain.” The plant varies in habit from compact to erect, with an intermediate number of stems, and grows from forty five centimetres to a meter tall. The leaves are hairy and range in colour from light to dark green.  The pods are cylindrical, pendant, and bluntly pointes, measuring up to fifteen centimetres long.  A single plant can produce around fifty pods.  The immature pods range from light to dark green and when they are ripe they become red.  The heat level is higher than a jalapeno, with the serrano measuring between 10,000 and 20,000 SHUs.  The Serrano is the pepper of choice for making pico de gallo, a salsa-type relish.

The Jalapeno Chilli Pepper

The jalapeno pepper was named for the town of Jalapa, Mexico, were it was originally marketed. However, it was not originally grown there, but was imported from the surrounding regions. The pods are thick-walled, conical in shape, dark green when immature with most turning red at maturity, and can be fairly hot.  The fruit skin may show a brown netting pattern called corking.  The corking does not affect the flavour of the fruit.

Because jalapenos have been selected and bred for thousands of years, they have developed unique flavours.  The majority of commercially grown jalapenos are preserved by canning or pickling, while some are dehydrated in either the green or red stage.  For the home gardener jalapenos are used fresh in salsas, sliced into rings for use with nachos or our favourite stuffed which is known as a popper.

Orange Habanero

The Orange Habanero could be considered the gold standard for habaneros.  Its pod is lantern-shaped, the standard shape of habaneros.  The habanero is grown on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and in Belize, and commercial production has expanded to Costa Rica and the United States.  It is probable the first “exotic” chilli pepper to gain fame and acceptance among the community of chilliheads.  The pods begin green and change to a shiny, waxy orange when mature.  The fruits are used fresh in salsas, cooked directly in dishes, or fermented to make a hot sauce.

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So what does SHU mean?

The Scoville scale is a measurement of the pungency (spicy heat) of chili peppers, such as the jalapeño, the ghost pepper, and the world’s current hottest pepper—the Carolina Reaper, or other spicy foods as reported in Scoville heat units (SHU), a function of capsaicin concentration. Capsaicin is one of many related chemicals, collectively called capsaicinoids. The scale is named after its creator, American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville. His method, devised in 1912, is known as the Scoville Organoleptic Test.

Unlike methods based on high-performance liquid chromatography, the Scoville scale is an empirical measurement dependent on the capsaicin sensitivity of testers and so is not a precise or accurate method to measure capsaicinoid concentration.

In Scoville’s method, an exact weight of dried pepper is dissolved in alcohol to extract the heat components (capsinoids), then diluted in a solution of sugar water. Decreasing concentrations of the extracted capsinoids are given to a panel of five trained tasters, until a majority (at least three) can no longer detect the heat in a dilution. The heat level is based on this dilution, rated in multiples of 100 SHU.

A weakness of the Scoville Organoleptic Test is it’s imprecision due to human subjectivity, depending on the taster’s palate and their number of mouth heat receptors, which varies greatly among people. Another weakness is sensory fatigue: the palate is quickly desensitised to capsaicins after tasting a few samples within a short time period. Results vary widely (up to ± 50%) between laboratories.

Since Scoville ratings are defined per unit of dry mass, comparison of ratings between products having different water content can be misleading. For example, typical fresh chili peppers have a water content around 90 percent, whereas Tabasco sauce has a water content of 95 percent. For law-enforcement-grade pepper spray, values from 500,000 up to 1 million SHU have been mentioned, but the actual strength of the spray depends on the dilution, which could vary by a factor of 10.

The chilis with the highest rating on the Scoville scale exceed one million Scoville units, and include specimens of naga jolokia or bhut jolokia and its cultivar, the “ghost chili”, which does not have official cultivar status. The Carolina Reaper is currently the highest rated pepper in the world.

Numerical results for any specimen vary depending on its cultivation conditions and the uncertainty of the laboratory methods used to assess the capsaicinoid content. Pungency values for any pepper are variable, owing to expected variation within a species—easily by a factor of 10 or more—depending on seed lineage, climate (humidity is a big factor for the Bhut Jolokia; the Dorset Naga and the original Naga have quite different ratings), and even soil (this is especially true of habaneros). The inaccuracies described in the measurement methods above also contribute to the imprecision of these values.

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We will be at this years Murphy’s Creek Chilli Festival 2017 and we will be selling live chilli plants including the “Reaper!”

What you need to know

The Murphy’s Creek Chilli Festival is the place to satisfy your craving for spice and fire. There is something for everyone you can sample everything from chilli chocolate to Spicy sauces and chutneys. If the heat gets too much you can cool down at the bar or with one of our loaded slushies. Perhaps wander between tents tasting, shopping, enjoying the fun family vibe, talking with exhibitors, and hobnobbing with fellow chilli heads.

• Date – Sunday, October 15, 2017
• Time – from 10am to 4pm
• Location – Jessie Ln, Murphys Creek QLD
• Costs – Free event
• Drinks – Bar opens 11am

Exotic Chillies

Come and visit us at the 2017 Murphy’s Creek Chilli Festival, if you are chasing live reaper plants then we will have plenty available on the day.  If there is something else you are chasing please let us know.

For those that may not be familiar with the Reaper it is the current record holder, that’s right the worlds hottest!  The Carolina Reaper, now famously known as the world’s hottest chili pepper, averages 1,569,300 SHU on the Scoville Scale with levels that even peak over 2,200,000 SHU. In other words, it’s a pepper that’s a 100 times hotter than a Jalapeno. The Carolina Reaper, which is a hybrid chili pepper, is apart of the Capsicum chinense species; having originally been called “HP22B” by it’s creator Ed Currie, owner and runner of the PuckerButt Pepper Company which is located in Fort Mill, South Carolina.

Culinary Uses

While that may not sound like something people would want to put anywhere near their mouths, taste buds apparently can’t get enough as the super hot pepper business continues to get even hotter; which has now become one of America’s fastest=growing industries. Spicy food is also appearing almost 15% more on menus from 2010. As for Sriracha hot chili sauce, the brand sold over 20 million bottles just last year. Ketchup is also getting hotter with the release of Heinz’s Hot & Spicy Ketchup. Red Robin has even introduced a new line of sandwiches and burgers dressed with habanero sauce, called island fire, in addition to their burger that features a scorching ghost pepper sauce. And now, in 2013, a majority of Americans are saying they prefer hot or spicy foods.

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Well we have just entered winter and the chili plants are starting to feel the cold. I’m not sure what everyone else does over winter but this is basically my approach to growing chillies over winter.

Firstly to give you a bit of an idea on the climate we are dealing with. Our winters are not that harsh, so keeping them alive is very achievable. We normally get a lot of wind, rain and the temps range from -1 deg Celsius to around 16 deg Celsius (30.2F – 60.8F). On the odd occasion we do get early morning frost. But I have got my chillies growing on high ground so the frost does not hit them too bad.

So the battle for me is combatting the overwatering and the 30+ Knott winds. Because what happens is the plants get water logged the ground does not dry out and the chilli plants get flattened by the gale force winds.

Preparing your chillies for winter

So weeks before we come into winter we make sure all our plants are super healthy. We make sure there is a good layer of sugarcane mulch protecting the ground from getting too cold and water logged. We also steak the plants so they have support to battle the wind. Every chilli plant gets stripped of all pods. The reason for this is we just want to make sure the plant is not struggling to support too much weight and it does not have to worry about supplying nutrient to the pods. So once a week during winter we strip each plant of all fruit.

The advantages of keeping your chilli crop alive during winter is, come summer you will have mature plants that will start producing straight away.
Additionally while your chillies are producing lots of pods during the warmer months make sure you dry plenty of pods out and run them through a spice grinder that way you will have plenty of chilli powder to keep you going over winter if your chilli plants do not produce.

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The first hour

As you can see in this photo the plant is very wilted. I mixed up 5 litres of liquid fertiliser and applied the full 5 litres to the wilting chilli.

3 hours later

As you can see the chilli plant is recovering nicely. The plant is still sitting in the sun, I live in Queensland so the sun can be very aggressive. I gave this chilli an additional 3 litres of water.

6 hours later

As you can see this chilli plant has almost fully recovered from dehydration. On a side note the liquid fertiliser helped in ripening most of the pods that where on this particular plant. I am going to repeat this test and see if I can repeat the results.

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