When you are chopping up hot peppers of any kind for cooking, canning, or drying, save the seeds. Separate as many as you can from the pith, but don't use the pith. Line a baking sheet or pie pan with wax paper and put the seeds in it. Put it in your oven, on it's lowest setting, and leave it for about 15 minutes.
Use these in place of hot pepper flakes, but be careful, they might be hotter than you are used to. A lot of the heat in chile peppers is in the pith and seeds. Using something you would normally throw out it the ultimate in thriftiness.
By Free2B from North Royalton, OH
Add your voice! Click below to comment. ThriftyFun is powered by your wisdom!
Excellent idea and instructions, Barb! I would have never thought to do that! You can sneak some of them aside, place spread out on a plate and allow to dry for three or four days in a warm or sunny area to use if you decide you want to start your own crop next year too :-)
Thank you, Deeli. Seed saving is one really good way to save money, isn't it? Just think - one seed produces one plant for free, and then you get all the great veggies from that plant.
I bought what I thought was a green bell plant at a sale from our local nursery. Turned out that someone had switched the little ID tags, and what I'd actually bought was a habanero pepper plant. One plant. I bought a larger pot with the intentions of just leaving it in the pot, and that plant made enough pepper for half of Mexico. It grew just fine and produced
amazingly well for nearly 4 years before just getting tired, I guess. It stopped bearing, dried up, keeled over and died.
The peppers were way too hot for us, so we were giving them to a friend who made his own pepper sauce. The flavor was delicious, but hot enough to burn the whiskers off your tongue. I wish I'd thought to keep a few of those dried peppers.
When you need dried pepper flakes, just crush up the whole pepper, seeds and all (minus the stems), and add them to whatever you're cooking that needs a good shot of pepper flakes. Our men like pepper flakes on Pizza. and the Pizza Parlors here have little jars of them on the tables along with
grated cheeses.
I'm sure you have two green thumbs. :-)
Here's a thumbs up for your great ideas.
Pookarina
Add your voice! Click below to comment. ThriftyFun is powered by your wisdom!
