Storing and freezing chillies at home
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!