It has been a damn hot summer as we would say. Scorching was not only while being outside in bbq sessions and not doing too much because sweat would be all around. But I am talking about the pepper sessions of the summer and the result of what we were able to harvest over the last couple of weeks!
Carolina Reaper or a Bhut Juloka? I think the last one but we all are not sure, because we didn't keep the signs..oopsie
It started mostly with us fooling around with just having pepper seeds that came literally from the inside of a pepper and trying to plant these. For all of you who have tried this before and live in a colder climate, this really is not very easy as peppers tend to love warmth before they start to sprout. 25 degrees Celsius or more to be exact they need to even start sprouting and growing and this was always a challenge.
The amount of times that I walked back on forth with the growing pot to put it in the sunlight to have it more warm and then put it back on the floor because the heating comes from the floor...countless times
This is a funny thing. This guys comes from a small plant just from the garden center. One pepper is perfect for a meal and way more heat than I had expected
And then when the plant had its flowers and was finally full grown(ish) and was starting to give fruits, it was the end of summer and it died a little because it was getting too cold. This happened a couple times in a row unfortunately and indeed....we are not the best plant care takers from around the planet
So the tactic from this year was a little bit different as we decided to buy mini-mini plants and work from there, so the end of summer would't come too early and there was a decent chance of actually getting the pepper fruits.
We the summer was good and actually we put in a lot of love which did pay off. Here you can see in a previous post of mine about these peppers that they were starting to grow and it was starting to look good.
A classic Madame Jeanette which is awesome in flavor, but the tree only made four of them. These are the remaining three
As you can see the plant itself is more yellow which means it needs more nutrician from the soil, which I kind of neglected to add some additional I must admit.
And this last plant with the tiny peppers is the winner of them all. I think there are literally 100 of these little rascals on the tree and very single one of them is even too spicy already for a meal. Actually when we were at Hivefest in Bangkok a couple years back we had a meal in Koh Chang which was so spicy I couldn't eat it, but hubby was super siked about it. We decided to ask inside what kind of peppers there were in there.
Now here they are. The same ones, but then in the garden. Aint that something?
Now it is getting colder outside there is a call to action on doing something with the fruits before they start to rot because of the rain. The plant with the miniature peppers the tactic will be to wash out all of the soil, give it some new soil without any outdoor buggers and take it inside for in the winter because this literally will give heat for the next 3-4 months on a daily basis
But the bigger ones are too big to put in a whole meal without going through the roof so drying was the new strategy to it is an option to eat 1 piece over multiple days.
Good old google helped with the ideas of the temperatures and we started out with drying them on 50 degrees celcius for 6 hours. No oil or anything over it, just plain old peppers in the oven.
Honestly, I didn't see anything happen after those hours so we decided to crank up the temperature to 90 degrees Celsius and did this for about 3 hours. Then you were able to see something happen, but still it wasn't what you had expected for that amount of time.
So we left them in for another two hours and then at a certain point I could feel sweat on my upper lip developing because I was in the kitchen with the fumes coming from the oven. That is how hot they are, that the air also turns hot.
So now we have dried peppers which you also could grind even but are also perfect for slicing off a small piece. And we have the plant with the small peppers which has produced so much.
I would call it a succesful summer in what eventually ended up growing this is enough heat to replace the gasbill for the next couple of months ;)