We be pickling the peppers! Our Hot Wax peppers were just begging for a harvest, so it was definitely time for us to cross this one off the list!
One of our focuses in preservation is to produce products that we would typically buy. We’d almost always have a can of pepperoncini’s in the fridge, so it makes a ton of sense to grow and make our own.
Most types of peppers can be pickled and canned like this. We favor banana and wax types as these mimic the traditional pepperoncini fairly well. Both banana and hot wax are excellent cool climate producers, typically even throwing down in our coolest seasons.
One of the great things about canning your own pickled peppers is you get to choose the heat level. We’re spicy people, so we tend to favor Hungarian Wax peppers that come in around 5,000 to 10,000 scoville. But, you can also opt to grow Banana peppers that are very low on the heat scale, typically between 0 and 500 scoville. Sometimes we do both. You can find recipes for whole peppers, rings or even diced relish style pickling. It’s kind of a choose your own adventure thing when it comes to your preferred presentation.
We don’t tend to go too crazy with our Hungarian’s, you really don’t need a ton of peppers to make a lot of pickled peppers. Just a couple plants here, producing a couple pounds of peppers total, is more than enough for us to get through the year. We say this most seasons, but we’re not preppers that are preparing for the apocalypse. We produce fairly close to what we actually need.
If canning isn’t your thing, you can also do quick pickling of peppers. This gets you about a month of storage time and avoids canning efforts entirely. We find we don’t go through them quite that fast, so that’s why we generally prefer using canning as our preservation method.
It’s our first time canning outside in our new preservation area, too! We’re putting it through the paces and it’s still working well for us. We might pick up a hot plate that we can dedicate to our preservation area as most canning efforts require two burners. Having things a little further away form the kitchen definitely was a learning curve, but it’s still nice to have our operations under cover.
We’ll be focusing on a bit of pepper based content here very soon as we’re starting to see maturity across quite a few of our plants. It’s my personal favorite thing to grow, there’s a reason we typically grow over 80 pepper plants each season!
