Laura Halladay: Go ahead and get started, since it is four o'clock we want to welcome all of you to preserving peppers we're going to cover kinane drying and freezing, my name is Laura holiday, and I am from green county Ohio which is closing your area presenting with me today is Lisa.
Lisa Barlage: And Lisa barley and I am in chula coffee in Ross county.
Laura Halladay: So just a few zoom basics, as we get started here not familiar, we have the chat feature which each of us have been utilizing to communicate with us, you can chat with just a host.
Laura Halladay: Or you can kind of move that over to all we can have an interactive group discussion, you may also ask your questions in that chat feature or in the question answer.
Laura Halladay: Whichever you feel more comfortable with feel free to ask us questions as we go along, we missed them we'll make sure we have a time at the end to answer any of those questions.
Laura Halladay: Case you're not familiar with Ohio State University extension, we are an education driven organization that.
Laura Halladay: promotes.
Laura Halladay: Lifelong learning and we work as kind of a connection between the Community and the university itself, bringing the education and research from the.
Laura Halladay: university level out throughout all 88 counties in Ohio we have four main program areas, agriculture and natural resources for each youth development Community development at least and I both are from the feeling and consumer sciences program area.
Laura Halladay: This presentation can be made a an alternative media, upon request, we are an equal opportunity provider anywhere you note any trade names or vendors no discrimination or endorsement is intended by the Ohio State University.
Laura Halladay: So today we're talking about all things pepper so cover the selection yield and safety when interacting and dealing with peppers methods of pepper preservation.
Laura Halladay: such as freezing drying and canning and will actually cover a couple of different recipes on how you can preserve those peppers.
Laura Halladay: we'll get started with selection and your time that you're working with a food product to preserve you want the best possible quality so that your can.
Laura Halladay: Product is at its best so you're looking for crisp fresh blemish free peppers fresh out of the garden without much whole time is is prefer and, generally speaking, when we look at our pepper selection it's hard to do a.
Laura Halladay: weight analysis, because each one very those variables, such as moisture content and variety, but these numbers are estimation so approximately one bushel equal about 25 pounds of peppers.
Laura Halladay: One bushel make about 17 to 21 courts of Cayenne peppers, so in that quarter camp peppers is about one and a third pounds again, those are estimations but those could be kind of a rough idea, as you start to purchase your peppers or harvest your peppers for processing.
Laura Halladay: Some safety that we want to consider and how do we prepare our peppers so large for our larger peppers, we need to.
Laura Halladay: Take the seeds out and they slice them to fit into those jars comfortably for our smaller peppers you can actually can them whole you do need to cut.
Laura Halladay: Cut slips into them so that the liquid can penetrate the PEPPER smaller peppers may also be sliced or cut into rings.
Laura Halladay: Somehow sometimes have tougher skins and will need to be peeled there's two main methods for this one is with your oven or.
Laura Halladay: or in the broiler for the oven method heat your oven to about 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
Laura Halladay: And then same thing with that broiler get it fired up and warmed up and then for both of those were looking about six to eight minutes in the oven.
Laura Halladay: Until those skin start to blister you also do this on the range top by covering a hot burner, with a hot heavy wire mesh place those peppers directly on that mesh.
Laura Halladay: For several minutes again watch for those skins to blizzard lister a lot of peppers to cool cover with a damp cloth and easily be able to pull those skins off.
Laura Halladay: It is important to note that pepper can be hot peppers can be irritating to the skin and to respiratory into your respiratory system.
Laura Halladay: And so handle with care is recommended that you were plastic or rubber gloves in the wash your hands thoroughly when working with peppers I back in.
Laura Halladay: college learned this the hard way I did wear gloves while all preparing my hot peppers unfortunately must not have washed my hands thoroughly enough.
Laura Halladay: experienced some strong irritation when I touched my eye so learn from my mistake it's something I will never forget never do again make sure you wear gloves and wash your hands thoroughly when dealing with pepper.
Laura Halladay: So peppers kind of have a hardness scale we call it the that's called the scoville scale or can kind of think of it as a heat meter this.
Laura Halladay: list shows a numerous amount of chili peppers, in particular, and the varieties are sorted by their pregnancy or the caffeine.
Laura Halladay: content and kind of how hot how spicy they are the scoville scale was actually developed in 1912 by an American oncologist wilbur scoville and so he provided us this heat scale.
Laura Halladay: Some examples of mild peppers that you see there on our list our Colorado i'm gearing in yellow yellow box peppers and some of our hot peppers.
Laura Halladay: Are Cayenne habanero Tabasco jalapeno and the hottest pepper being the Carolina Reaper at 1.5 million on that scoville scale.
Laura Halladay: is a good time here to note that the spiciness of that heat level of the PEPPER does not affect the pH so we'll still have to can are peppers the same way or preserver peppers the same way, regardless of spice level and Lisa will touch on that a little bit more and her recipe.
Lisa Barlage: we're going to start with the oldest method of food preservation and that is drying or dehydrating food.
Lisa Barlage: And throughout history, the sun, the wind even fire were used to remove water from food, so that it could be stored.
Lisa Barlage: And so food dehydration is simply removing the water from the food by circulating air and it prohibits the growth of bacteria and enzymes dried foods are certainly still tasty.
Laura Halladay: nutritious.
Lisa Barlage: And a benefit is that they're very lightweight So if you think about astronauts that's why they take dried food with them and just faces they're very low weight.
Lisa Barlage: Just like other foods that you're going to preserve you want to still select really right fresh produce it as a blemish free and mold free so we still want that high quality produce.
Lisa Barlage: We want the best quality foods and we want to remove the seeds and cut into strips or rings and then.
Lisa Barlage: For this type of preserving you're going to actually steam blanch them for about 10 minutes which you'll listen to us later talk about freezing and that 10 minutes is a lot longer.
Lisa Barlage: Of a blanch than you would use, for instance for freezing and then you're going to dry them either in a food dehydrator, which is a machine and they come in a variety of shapes and sizes costs as well.
Lisa Barlage: Or you can dry it in an oven on trays the caution that I do want to mention to you is, if you think well I don't have a dehydrator I want to try it this year, before I spend the money on the purchase.
Lisa Barlage: is to look at your oven and see how low the temperature goes you actually need to go below 200 degrees.
Lisa Barlage: Some recommendations say as low as 142 do drying and so many new ovens have a low of either 200 or 250 degrees so really look at your oven before you spend the time getting ready to do something that your oven may not even have the capability to do.
Lisa Barlage: And then to know when they're done it's there may be a chart if you have the machine that will give you kind of a guideline.
Lisa Barlage: But the real way that you see if it's done or not is you're going to snap it into and it's going to break it's not like other foods work you bend it I think about.
Lisa Barlage: dried apples that I might purchase in store they're going to definitely be kind of pliable and still bend to have a truly fully dried vegetable it's going to actually snap when it is.
Lisa Barlage: broken and you also see on this photo one of the photos on our slide is that you can make your own chili powder at home, and to do that you're going to completely dry up the PEPPER and then you're going to process it in your blender.
Lisa Barlage: To make that powder and you do want to make sure that lid is on everything is fully sealed if you turn that on then you're just going to spread that powder throughout your kitchen and you definitely will like Laura be regretting the PEPPER and thinking about food safety with those.
Lisa Barlage: Now we're going to move on to freezing and the nice thing about freezing is that it doesn't really use a lot of unusual equipment it's pretty much things that most people have.
Lisa Barlage: around their home and it's something that you can do with small quantities you don't have to have a huge quantity.
Lisa Barlage: Of peppers to do some freezing so just like our are drying you want those high quality peppers want to remove any bad spots we're going to wash them.
Lisa Barlage: Again, cut into strips or rings, and this is where we talk about that if we're going to water blanch them, which is what the the top photo is.
Lisa Barlage: we're going to do that for two minutes and boiling water if we're going to steam Blanche and buy a steam blanch it the basket is going to sit above the water and you're going to be able to put like a Dome blood over the top.
Lisa Barlage: And then it would be three minutes for the steam blanch you're going to cool that down in ice water, just like you do other foods that have been blanched and go ahead and pat that dry.
Lisa Barlage: Then you can see, on the one photo that you can the best way really to do it is to go ahead and place it on a tray so that it can be individually frozen if you.
Lisa Barlage: want to package, it all together at one time well you'll end up as a big huge clump of peppers and you won't be able to separate them, and if you have.
Lisa Barlage: Pan frozen them first and then package them you'll have the ability to dump out just as much as you need for let's say a stir fry recipe.
Lisa Barlage: or in the case of my coworker on the bottom who froze the little pep dice pepper pieces, you can put that in all kinds of foods that can go in your spaghetti your chili you know it doesn't matter what you put it in it's already.
Lisa Barlage: diced up and ready to go and you will place this in your freezer containers and label them and store for up to one year if you have a freezer that is set at zero.
Laura Halladay: Thanks we're going to talk about.
Laura Halladay: canning peppers so peppers are low.
Laura Halladay: acid vegetable and so they do need to be pressure Kenyan unless that they have been people during processing.
Laura Halladay: When you're filling your jargon was peppers you want to fill the loosely again remember those larger peppers need to be.
Laura Halladay: cut into you nice char sized pieces and your smaller peppers can remain whole as long as you have slip them so that the.
Laura Halladay: boiling water can penetrate them fill out the fresh boiling water over top without leaving about an inch of headspace please remember that anytime that we are canning any product but pepper product you're using a research base recipe from the usda or university extension resource.
Lisa Barlage: At this point, we're going to tell you about another option that you may have, and it is a sweet pepper relish.
Lisa Barlage: And this was a kind of a historical recipe for my family, we always would grow peppers in our garden, and we would make something similar.
Lisa Barlage: And what I will caution you to is that my family used to make it and then, as I learned much more about food preservation I realized that their recipe was not approved.
Lisa Barlage: And so I have searched high and low and finally found a very similar recipe which is the one that I did for Class So you can see the ingredients listed here and i'm going to talk about all of those ingredients.
Lisa Barlage: What you do is you're going to wash your peppers first and you actually want to weigh them because this pepper recipe called for.
Lisa Barlage: three to four pounds of peppers I bought a large peppers at my farmers market and I ended up with lots of peppers So if you have small peppers.
Lisa Barlage: You know, you may use seven or eight mine were fairly large and I ended up with lots of extra peppers.
Lisa Barlage: You will then way them and so i've got them on a food scale and the photos and you're going to weigh them to get three to four pounds I weighed them out so that I had three and a half pounds and I still had more than enough peppers for the recipe.
Lisa Barlage: So i've gathered all of my ingredients.
Lisa Barlage: And I have my onions, I have some pickling salt some vinegar I I bought both.
Lisa Barlage: kinds of vinegar and normally I would have this in my office but had been a while in our vinegar was out of date and because, with canning you're using.
Lisa Barlage: You need to make sure you're using vinegar that is a 5% I went ahead and got new vinegar if I was just making salad dressing probably wouldn't worry about it.
Lisa Barlage: Then you're going to cut up your peppers and remove those seeds and if you have a large amount of the white in the Center you probably want to remove that as well.
Lisa Barlage: And so, then you're just going to cut it into really large chunks this might be something that you would use in like a chop for a stir fry or something like that.
Lisa Barlage: And you have a couple choices of how you're going to grind them up, because my family always had a old metal crank grinder that we usually use a lot of.
Lisa Barlage: appliances, will have a food processor grinder that you can use that will grind them up for you really well.
Lisa Barlage: or in this blender that is in the photo it had a salsa grinder feature, and that was what I ended up using that was available at my office.
Lisa Barlage: So I went ahead and ground up my peppers and you also chop and grind up your onions, and then what you're going to end up with is about five cups each.
Lisa Barlage: of both colors of pepper and you could have also used yellow orange it doesn't matter you're going to need to come up with that 10 cups of peppers.
Lisa Barlage: And I put my peppers all together, I didn't care about the colors and then a cup and a half of onions that are also been chopped and then ground up, I decided to use the white distilled vinegar and it's two and a half cups and then it was two cups of sugar.
Lisa Barlage: And you're going to put this all together in your sauce pot something kind of large that you have plenty of space so you're going to put all those ingredients in.
Lisa Barlage: And you're going to add four teaspoons of mustard seed and four teaspoons of pickling salt.
Lisa Barlage: you're going to bring it all to a boil and then you're going to continue to simmer that at a low boil for 30 minutes it's going to thicken up a little bit.
Lisa Barlage: And then you always want to have hot jars for this type of processing and so because we are not pressing pressure canning it we are hot water bath and get you want to have hot jars and so.
Lisa Barlage: I love to run them through my dishwasher that's my typical method, but I didn't have the.
Lisa Barlage: ability to do that on this day, so I went ahead and just put them in my canner that I was bringing the water up to temperature anyway.
Lisa Barlage: And so, then you're going to fill your jars and you're going to leave a half inch headspace.
Lisa Barlage: And we just want to remind people that there's that additional step where you're going to remove those air bubbles, and sometimes we kind of get in a hurry we forget about that.
Lisa Barlage: So you see i've used just a plastic knife, they also make fancy tools that will do it for you.
Lisa Barlage: that are available, but you just want to make sure that you stick that in around the side of the JAR to remove any of those air bubbles that are in the jars and I actually after I did it, I had to.
Lisa Barlage: I had to add more so that's why we want to go ahead and do that get that air bubble out of there and I did have to add more of my product to my jars and we.
Lisa Barlage: also want to just remind you that when you put those lids on you're going to do a fingertip type co with with your hands.
Lisa Barlage: And it's not my brother in law who's really tall and huge it's not his fingertip tight it's just lisa's fingertip tight and go ahead and put them in your canner and return it to your boil and these only process for 10 minutes if you're at 1000 feet, which.
Lisa Barlage: Below 1000 feet, which is where I am much of Ohio is that way if you're over 1000 feet, then you're going to do 15 minutes for your 10 or sorry 15 pounds.
Lisa Barlage: For 15 minutes instead of 10 minutes, and so I did my processing I took them out, I allowed them to cool down, I was very fortunate all my jars sealed.
Lisa Barlage: And so once I did, that of course you're going to do, like you always do go ahead and remove those rings wipe everything down and then you label them and store for up to one year.
Lisa Barlage: And I served these two my co workers with some sausages for lunch, and it was a definitely a hit so it's a good easy recipe to do if you don't have a lot of experience with canning.
Laura Halladay: And one more thing to note with that relish or any type of recipe like I said earlier, the pH does not change, based on the heat, so if Lisa wanted to make that recipe.
Laura Halladay: A little bit spicy or she could have used a more spicy pepper and Miss make sure that her measurements remained the same in her recipe, and you can get a little bit hotter relish if you desire.
Lisa Barlage: Right, thank you.
Laura Halladay: another type of.
Laura Halladay: Food preservation of peppers is to pickle them some common varieties used for pickled peppers tend to be your more mild your Hungarian your yellow wax even your sweet cherry or sweet banana peppers I typically will pick a little sweet banana peppers.
Laura Halladay: That I grow in my garden and as kind of an easy way to skip the step of pressure canning because, with that pickling process with that vinegar added.
Laura Halladay: I can water bath canning similar to that relish recipe when you pickle product, we want to make sure we use non iodized or pickling salt.
Laura Halladay: We also want to make sure that that vinegar is at least 5% a city like Lisa mentioned if it's been a while, since you've used your vinegar if it's pass expiration date go ahead and purchase that new vinegar so you can ensure that it's acidity is what the bottle states.
Laura Halladay: Some tickling recipes do call for oil up to two tables spoons per pint.
Laura Halladay: do want to note that peppers preserved and oil is a different type of preservation and it will require additional processing time.
Laura Halladay: So, again anytime that you can a product utilize a research based recipe to ensure safety while preserving preserving that food at home so looking for usda recipes or university extension service recipe will help you ensure that has been researched and safe.
Lisa Barlage: And I know we have a couple questions that are in our question section so Denise ask.
Lisa Barlage: If the tray freezing was what you call flash freezing and I don't know if one of my co workers want to answer if they would prefer I do.
Lisa Barlage: My understanding is that true flash freezing has to be done at a very, very cold temperature which we're probably not going to get from home, but the tray freezing is a similar process, and so a lot of times you see it with small pieces of vegetable or.
Lisa Barlage: Like berries would be very commonly frozen on a tray and then you're going to move them over to.
Lisa Barlage: The freezer container.
Laura Halladay: that's my understanding to when I worked in food service, we had a special flash freezer equipment.
Laura Halladay: And so, in my mind tray freezing is kind of like the layman's version of it, but not officially freezing.
Lisa Barlage: And then I see our White vinegar apple cider vinegar interchangeable if the acidity is the same.
Lisa Barlage: And in this recipe is it offered either one could be used, the one that I mentioned.
Lisa Barlage: I noticed when I was looking at the store that there was some difference in acidity I saw some that were only 4%.
Lisa Barlage: acidity not five, which is what all of the canned foods need a five.
Lisa Barlage: There would be some recipes where I think you could probably end up with a different flavor if you use if it called for white and you used.
Lisa Barlage: apple cider That would be a caution that I would would give you before you did, that is to think about what flavor you're coming up with this one, it didn't matter, it said that you could use either, but I did use the white vinegar.
Lisa Barlage: So anybody else have any anything else about that.
Treva Williams: I think sometimes it's it's the preference, you know, some people prefer the apple cider vinegar and others prefer the white vinegar, but I think the big thing there is that acidity level, you know if the recipe gives you the choice you're free to using.
Lisa Barlage: I see Denise is asking us if we can.
Lisa Barlage: Over processed food if we leave it longer than advised.
Lisa Barlage: We were hot water bath thing in the recipes that we did primarily today so.
Lisa Barlage: I mean I don't think.
Lisa Barlage: Over processing a couple minutes isn't going to make a big difference.
Lisa Barlage: canning.
Lisa Barlage: I mean my take on that would be that you would start to lose quality.
Lisa Barlage: Your product may not.
Lisa Barlage: be like you may end up with separation in your product those kind of things tripa do you have a take on that.
Laura Halladay: Second, one might have lost Trevor.
Laura Halladay: I know for pressure canning of we over process, we can definitely lose like you said.
Laura Halladay: quality.
Laura Halladay: In it, and, depending on what you're making it even takes over over cooked over done.
Lisa Barlage: yeah it's it's not so much a wouldn't be a safety thing it would just be the quality would not be as good and plus you're using more of your resources.
Lisa Barlage: Much of it already takes a lot of time, so I guess I would caution you to i'm not sure if you're asking.
Lisa Barlage: You know if you don't know your altitude, that would be one thing we can send you some Apps that help you find that if you don't know.
Lisa Barlage: What your what feature at, for example.
Lisa Barlage: And then we had only about only can bell peppers once decades ago didn't try it again, as they were mush.
Lisa Barlage: A lot of peppers they tell you i'm not sure how you did it so they tell you not to do them.
Lisa Barlage: They tell you to put slits in them, for example.
Lisa Barlage: And most things are only telling you to can have the smaller peppers kind of hole.
Lisa Barlage: So.
Lisa Barlage: i'm just going to guess that maybe you overprocessed but i'm not knowing what technique, you did i'm just not sure.
Laura Halladay: And, by nature, the processing of them does soften them.
Laura Halladay: Some anyway, so you won't have that same crisp pepper regardless of method of preservation.
Lisa Barlage: mm hmm.
Lisa Barlage: And I see that we've got Denise has another question.
Lisa Barlage: Do you want to put that in the.
Lisa Barlage: chat Denise.
Laura Halladay: looks like she has added to the question and answer about pepper pepper jelly.
Lisa Barlage: Oh OK, I am it's cold enough.
Lisa Barlage: pepper jelly is really pretty good and.
Lisa Barlage: So often, you have particles of pepper that float to the top.
Lisa Barlage: i'm not sure I.
Laura Halladay: looks like based on our second question that she's having trouble getting it to kind of meld all together it's separating some.
Lisa Barlage: It has been so long since I made, I have made pepper jelly, but it has been really, really long time.
Lisa Barlage: I just know I use cheesecloth I believe and just like you would other jellies and really strained it out i'm not sure I have any other tips for you, because it's been too long since I did it.
Lisa Barlage: Okay, and so you use the ball recipe for your peppers.
Lisa Barlage: We know that some people do use the ball recipes were at this point Ohio State University extension, we really encourage people to use recipes from usda or from university extension, we know that many of our.
Lisa Barlage: counterparts with companies do their own research but we don't always see what their research says so, because we are, we do know what the national Center for home food preservation says and what.
Lisa Barlage: The usda say you can see, you know they released their research, we can see it, we know that their times are tested they're going to be safe.
Lisa Barlage: And we know that they're going to work for you, because they've been tried over and over and over so that is the only advice I can really give you about that.
Lisa Barlage: And I see that my coworker amy says.
Lisa Barlage: that she made pepper jelly a while back didn't have the separation issues.
Lisa Barlage: Oh, and she but she did a freezer refrigerator method so she she did not put it in.
Lisa Barlage: She didn't have water bath at or Canada she put it into a jar and just kept it in a refrigerator which usually got refrigerator jelly is probably going to be good for two to three weeks, and so you might think about that as well if you know you're going to use it quickly.
Lisa Barlage: And amy do you have.
Lisa Barlage: Final poll question for them.
Lisa Barlage: And we will be sending out the the resources that we used to everyone who's registered, so we will go ahead and get that out to you later in the week, and if you have any other questions feel free to reach out to Laura or myself.
Lisa Barlage: And we will definitely stay on for a little longer, if you have some other questions.
Laura Halladay: I think the next slide might have our next session on it.
Maybe.
Lisa Barlage: In two weeks or coworkers you have canning winter squash so if you're interested in that we hope that you'll participate.