The first signs of life

And then there was hot sauce.

Danger

Inspired by a comment from Rob of One Straw Revolution, Kelly decided to try running his dried out chile peppers through our old coffee grinder. It was quite a feat to clean all the coffee dust from the inside of the thing, but once we got that done, the grinder proved to be the quickest and most thorough way to chop up the chiles.

Kelly jammed the grinder full of peppers, gave it a couple zaps, and viola—crushed red peppers.

Now I live in fear of microscopic pepper dust finding its way into my food.

Where Crushed Red Pepper Comes From

Just before the first frost we pulled up our remaining hot pepper plants so we could dry them out. They didn't seem to be changing much at first, but as soon as we turned the heat on in the house they shriveled up real quick. Now the peppers are at the point where they shatter when they fall on the floor, so yesterday Kelly started harvesting the dry ones. He's gotten about a quart so far, and there is probably another quart left on the plants. He plans to mush them up with a mortar and pestle to make extra spicy pepper flakes.

Muy Picante

Because we were buying Trader Joe's hot sauce by the case to feed Kelly's spicy food addiction, this year we decided it might be more economical to grow our own hot peppers. We put in four varieties: three kinds of chiles and a jalapeño. Hot peppers all look pretty, but this year's pageant winner by a long shot was the tobasco chile.


Both of the tobasco chiles we planted were huge and covered with hundreds of tiny peppers by the end of the season. Just before it started getting frosty at night, we
pulled out the plants so we could dry out the peppers inside. Here's Kelly carrying a branch (and to give you an idea of how huge they got, he's 6'2"):



I think the plan for these is that they will be dried out and ground up into little chile flakes, which will presumably be incredibly hot. Just now I asked Kelly, "How hot would you say those little peppers are?" "Wicked," he said. "When I ate one, I was in a desperate position." It's true, I watched.

The rest of the peppers were made into hot sauce, and Kelly will probably post about that process soon; I can't even look at the pictures without my eyes watering and my tongue seizing up.