In the back of Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef are two delightful recipes. The first I tried was his basic tomato sauce. I’ve made several batches of it and have 1 cup portions in the freezer. It’s a good basic sauce for pasta or pizza, with some balsamic vinegar and some red chili peppers for a little kick.
I grew a lot of peppers this year in the garden. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them all but every year I experiment with something and this year was peppers! I grew Italian sweet peppers, bell peppers, Mexican anaheim peppers and a smaller Mexican pepper I can’t remember the name of at the moment. I’ve had great fun all summer mixing up salsa and adding my own peppers, cooking up tomato sauce with some of my Italian peppers, and adding them to various Indian dishes. I’ve also made two string to dry, one of the long Italian peppers and one of the smaller Mexican peppers.
I also roasted a whole batch of the Anaheim peppers and have those in the freezer. The plants are still going and I’ve got a mix of red and green peppers of various sizes. I spotted Jamie Oliver’s recipe for pickled chili peppers that just need refrigerating and thought to give them a go.
Wow! Yum! I let them sit in the fridge for 2 weeks before trying them and now I can’t stop eating them. Today for lunch I sliced up a long Italian red pepper and added it to a sandwich with some leftover steak. But some nights I just nibble on one for a late night snack. Other people crave chips I know. But I’ll almost always go for a vinegar laced treat.
Jamie Oliver’s Pickled Peppers
Ingredients
- 1 pound of chilies, mixed red and green
- boiling water
- 6 heaped tablespoons sugar
- 3 1/2 cups white wine or rice vinegar
- 15 black peppercorns
- 5 bay leaves
- 2 Tbs coriander seeds
- 5 teaspoons salt
Instructions
- Bring a few cups of water to boil while you’re prepping the peppers.
- Slice each pepper from stem to end on one side and remove the seeds. A small spoon or the handle of a spoon works great for this.
- Put the peppers in a small bowl as you clean out the seeds and when you’re done pour the boiling water over them and let them steep for 5 minutes to remove any remaining seeds. Drain.
- Warm the vinegar and sugar in a saucepan and stir until the sugar is dissolved. You don’t need to bring it to a boil. The sugar will dissolve before that.
- Take a quart jar and add the peppercorns, bay leaves, coriander seeds, chilies, and salt to the jar.
- Pour the vinegar and sugar mixture into the jar of chilies. Allow it to cool, then put the lid on and stick in the back of your fridge so you can ignore it for a few weeks. At least 2 anyway! Jamie Oliver says it will keep in the fridge for 4 months but I think mine will be consumed long before that!
I am addicted to pickled peppers.