Cooking with Chillies

How to freeze Chillies

The end of the Chilli growing season for 2022 is fast approaching. If your Chillies are ripe or at least a mature green, now is the time to pick them. If you have a big harvest , besides drying Chillies, pickling them or turning them into hot sauces, relishes, jams or chutneys, a great way of preserving Chillis to freeze them.  Alternatively, it might be better to bring them in doors as if the first frost arrives. Otherwise, you will have to throw them away. They will become mushy, and they will not be able to be stored

Freezing Chillies can be done in two ways. The first method is to freeze them with their stalks intact; the second is to chop them finely and place them in ice trays. When freezing in ice- trays fill the individual cavities as much as possible and then fill the cavity with a little water. Once the trays have been frozen, remove the Chilli cubes and place them in a resealable plastic bag and place them in your freezer. Then when cooking, it simply becomes a matter of removing a cube from the bag and popping it into whatever ever you are making.

When freezing them whole place the Chillies in resealable bag and remove as much air as possible before resealing the bag . Once they have  been frozen whole  they can be chopped into pieces and added  into food. They can also be grated while still frozen into any dish you are preparing.

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Drying Chillies

We are now at the stage in the season, where most of us harvest our Chillies. It is the time of year when we need to decide how we will use them.  We can make pickles, jams, relishes, Chilli oils, and Chilli sauces. Alternatively, we can preserve them either by freezing or drying

Drying Chillies is a particularly good way to preserve Chillies. This can be done in a dehydrator or alternatively in an oven.  Electric dehydrators are a particularly good way to dry Chillies. A dehydrator can be purchased relatively inexpensively online for between £50 and £60. They generally consist of a dehydrating unit, which has a fan, and multi-tier drying trays with metal or plastic mesh bases, which are used to dehydrate Chillies

To use this type of dehydrator, simply place whole Chillies in dehydrating trays on top of the dehydrator and place the lid on. Set the temperature to about sixty degrees Celsius, and turn on the dehydrator. After between eight and twelve hours, the Chillies will be dry. Remove them from the tray and pack them into airtight jars for later use.

There are more expensive dehydrators that can be used to dry Chillles. They resemble mini ovens, complete with thermostats, drying shelves and a glass door.  They are however somewhat more expensive and cost anywhere from £200 or more

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A soldier’s best friend

In my previous post on this subject, I mentioned that members of the Armed Forces are great fans of hot sauces. So much so, they even take them on twenty-four-hour combat missions as a standard part of their operational ration packs.

If hot sauces are so important that soldiers take them into combat, just imagine where else they are used.  Hot sauce goes on everything from the eggy, cheesy, hammy, bread on submarines to the breakfast fried eggs in an army mess hall. It is almost certainly used in the cuisine enjoyed by officers. Hot sauce is a soldier’s best friend

Where it is easy to find hot sauces back in the United Kingdom nowadays, but this was not always the case. Often when soldiers returned from overseas tours of duty, they would soon discover  the hot sauces they had come to love in other parts of the world were hard to find. It wasn’t that they couldn’t get their hands on Tabasco® or Lingham’s Chilli sauce (see note).  These sauces had already been in the UK for a long time, and were already national favourites. It was more a matter of trying to find the types of sauces they had enjoyed overseas. These sauces were far different to the ones  back home.

It is likely the only way to get around this was to grow Chillies and make their own hot sauces. However, this solution was not that easy to achieve. Seeds for Chillies were not that easy to find, and not all soldiers were gardeners (or cooks for that matter).  Sadly, this meant they had to go without their favourite sauce. It was a crazy situation, you needed hot sauce, but couldn’t buy it for love nor money.

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When did it start?

Slow cooking dates back to the start of organised society. People living in towns would cook their bread in a shared central wood burning oven situated in the town centre. At the end of the day once all the bread had been cooked, the oven would still be really hot. While it was cooling down, the townsfolk would place their cooking pots into the oven. They would allow their food to cook slowly overnight. The next day, the food would be fully cooked, tender, and full of flavour.

The slow cooking used by the Greeks to make Kleftiko has a similar history. The story goes that when thieves stole a lamb, they would dig a hole and build a fire with lots of wooden logs. Once the logs had burned down, they would place the lamb on top of the smouldering embers, cover the hole with soil and seal it with mud.  They did as a way of preventing the smell of their cooking, leading pursuers to where they were.  Once the threat of capture had diminished, they would return to remove the lamb, which now had become succulently cooked and tender from the underground oven.

The Taino and escaped slaves (Maroons) in the Caribbean used the same method of cooking to prevent being captured. They would bury wild hogs they had caught in underground ovens. Before so they would cover the hog with salt, wild herbs and spices like pimento and Chillies and then wrap them in leaves. Doing this added great spicy flavour to the meat while it cooked and keep humidity constant while the meat was cooking. This style of cooking led to what has become known today as jerking meat (as for example in Jerk Chicken and Jerk pork)

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Chillies and cheese

Bhutan is a country that loves its Chillies. Indeed, the average family in this small landlocked country between India and China eats more than a kilogram of Chillies per week. Just about every dish they prepare has Chillies of some form or the other in it.  Because Chillies in Bhutan are seen more as a vegetable than a spice, the typical type of Chilli used in this cooking is not exceptionally hot. They fall into a mild to medium heat range. These include Chillies like the Sha Ema, Baegop Ema, Ema Mapa, Super Solu, Yangtsepa Ema and the Urka Bangla Chilli

But that is not to say that the Chillies they eat are not hot. One of the hottest The Dalle Khursani or Jyanmaara Khursani carries two names for good reason. It has the name of Dalle Khursani (which translates to round ball) because this describes the shape of these Chillies. The Chillies second name of Jyanmaara Khursani translates to “Lifetaker” Chillies. It carries this name because it is extremely hot, with a Scoville rating of 100000 to 350000 Shu

While Bhutan has many dishes that contain Chillies, Ema Datchi (Bhutan’s national dish), is a Chilli stew made with cheese and Chillies. Ema means Chilli, and the Datshi part of the name refers to the type of cheese used to make the dish. Datshi is a type of cheese made using female yak  or cow’s milk. The cheese is similar in appearance to ricotta, and its flavour is somewhere between feta and Gruyere cheese

Bhutan’s national dish intrigues me so much that I have decided to make it. Of course, it is unlikely that I will find the exact Chillies they use in Bhutan or Datshi cheese to make this dish, so I will have to make substitutions. However, I am relatively sure I will get close. It is certainly worth a bash

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Closer than you think

Not many people will know that Chillies and spuds  have a lot in common. Not only will you find them together in some of the world’s finest cooking, but they both originally come from the same part of the world and also belong to the same biological family.

Both Chillies and potatoes originated in a region that shares modern-day southern Peru, and the extreme north-western part of Bolivia. If that’s not amazing enough, consider this. They both belong to the Solanaceae family, a classification they share with aubergines, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes.

That in itself is intriguing, but what is even more fascinating is that both Chillies and spuds  were among the first-ever domesticated vegetables in Peru. They were cultivated there as early as 10000 years ago. This means they have been found together in cooking for thousands of years

Archaeologically verified evidence dating back to 2500 BC was found in a coastal site in Ancón, Central Peru, that potatoes were already being eaten at that time. The earliest archaeological evidence of Chillies being consumed was found in the Guitarrero Cave  in Peru. This evidence links Chillies being eaten as early as 8,500 BCE. This is not to say that Chillies were cultivated before potatoes . It is simply that potatoes’ do not preserve well. This has made finding earlier proof of their use for archaeological purposes more difficult

Today, it is difficult to imagine cooking without Chilles or spuds, but there was a time (not so long ago) when they were unknown outside of South America.  It took Christopher Columbus to bring  the first Chillies back the old world in 1492, after he found them in the West Indies. It would take another fifty-eight years before spuds appeared on the scene.

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Where it all began

Just about everybody loves a Bloody Mary. There are a few versions of how this spicy cocktail came about, but it was most likely created in New York City in 1934 by a bartender named Fernand Petiot. Whether he used Tabasco® hot sauce to create Bloody Marys is a matter of speculation. However, in its original form, the cocktail certainly contained cayenne pepper and black pepper. Thus, once Bloody Marys started becoming popular, it is not hard to imagine bar staff using Tabasco®. to make them. Tabasco® had already been available in the United States at that time for well over sixty years

Bloody Marys almost certainly would have found their way to the United Kingdom after becoming popular in the USA. After all, the British travelled (whether as businesspeople or tourists) to the United States all the time. It is probable these visitors would have brought the recipe back to the UK. If they had (and they almost certainly did), they wouldn’t have needed to look hard to find Tabasco®. It was already here. Tabasco® had already been in the United Kingdom for some time. It had arrived in England in 1874

Now, that is a sobering thought (if you will excuse the pun). For Tabasco to be already here must have meant it had a following. How was it that a country known for bland food felt it needed a hot sauce as part of its cuisine?

The probable answer is that chefs had introduced it as a subtle way of adding flavour to sauces.  Whether this is accurate is unclear. But, be it as it may, the popularity of the Bloody Mary would soon mean that Tabasco would find another home. It would become part of a cocktail cabinet of the dinner party set and in UK cocktail bars. . The start of the history of hot sauces in the United Kingdom had begun.

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