Pickled Whole Chillies

Recipe of the Week – Pickled Chilli Peppers

Shows off the full splendour of the chillies

I love my chillies and am always looking for ways to preserve them; here is another!Chilli peppers will freeze and dry quite well, but pickling is an approach that retains their colour and flavour excellently. The vinegar in the pickle is also believed to reduce the heat in them.
This excellent recipe is from Mark Diacono’s A Year at Otter Farm and takes just afew minutes to make. This recipe made three jam-jars of pickle, with the chilliesstanding upright in the jars.

Ingredients:

• 250g chilli peppers

• 500ml white wine vinegar

• a pinch of salt

• 100g caster sugar

• 3 bay leaves

• 12 peppercorns

Directions

Dissolve the sugar and salt in the vinegar in a pan over a medium heat. Add the bay leaf and the peppercorns and simmer for 10 minutes. Be careful that it doesn’t boil off.

Remove from the heat.

Pierce each chilli 5 or 6 times.

Put the chilli-peppers into sterilised jars and pour the hot vinegar over them to cover – then seal. Check liquid levels in jars after about a week.

Store in a cool, dark cupboard for up to a year. Keep in the fridge once opened.