Monthly Archives: October 2016
Pepper-palooza: More Possibilities for Peppers
I shared a few pepper recipes using our garden peppers the other day, but I wanted to show some other options for using the peppers as well.
Dehydrating Peppers
A lot of hot peppers are stored or used once they are dried. The most reliable way to dry peppers is using a dehydrator, although I’ve also had good luck (sometimes) using the oven or just letting peppers dry on the counter. The biggest issue with letting peppers dry on the counter is that if there is a chance the fruit have any fungal spores on them (or any blemishes), they can rot before they dry down sufficiently to store.
On the recommendation of Denise, our Foods & Nutrition Agent, I used the dehydrator outside and set at 135 degrees. It took about 8 hours to dry the smaller, hot peppers. It took about 16-20 hours to dry the larger, thicker-walled peppers, like the paprikas and Aleppos.
The dehydrator had several racks, so I was able to segregate the different peppers onto different racks.
I dried some of the cayenne peppers, lemon drop peppers, hot paprika peppers, and Aleppo peppers.
I don’t have specific plans for any of these at the moment, other than possibly grinding them into either pepper flakes or powder.
Well…the Lemon Drop peppers I have a hot sauce recipe to try. Sometime.
I did try to spread out the peppers to start, but they ended up towards the center anyway. These are the cayenne peppers. You can still see a little of the purple coloration despite the fact that they wee mostly red.
Frying Peppers
The Espelette (Basque region) and Fushimi (Japan) peppers, I tried with simple sautéing. The Espelette peppers probably should have been dried and ground instead…like a paprika pepper. Oh well.
These are the Espelette peppers. I sautéed them in a little hot oil, then sprinkled them with salt. They were too spicy for me to enjoy in that way. Definitely would have been better as a spice.
I followed with a pan of the Fushimi peppers. Hot pan, hot oil, fresh peppers.
After cooking, I sprinkled them with salt and let them cool enough to eat. This is one of the traditional ways to prepare these Fushimi peppers and the similar Shishito peppers. YUM! I am definitely regretting the bags of these peppers that I harvested and intended to sauté earlier in the season, but never got around to.
These peppers were not all that exciting otherwise. The walls are thin, the flavor was a little “green” and the seeds were too prevalent. But you sauté them in hot oil, sprinkle with salt, and they are transformed into a delicious appetizer.
Pepper-palooza: Pepper Recipes to Try
I finally had time to try a few recipes using some of our less common peppers in the Demo Garden. I still have a few other recipes I want to try as well.
Red Paprika Pepper Cream Sauce
I may have to plant hot paprika peppers myself, just so I can make this recipe every week. I adapted a straight red pepper cream sauce to the paprika sauce. A lot of sauces call for powdered paprika, but I wanted to try using the peppers fresh.
I ended up using one red bell pepper, two white sweet paprika peppers (Feher Ozon), and two red hot paprikas (Leutschauer).
This was pretty much the easiest recipe that I never knew I was missing out on. You put two cups of cream and the chopped peppers in a saucepan. Bring it to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer. Cook until the cream is reduced by half and the peppers are soft (about 30 minutes). If you want something that is lower fat, you can use fat free 
half and half. (I checked with our foods agent. She also said you could use cream and just use it sparingly to accent your food, rather than drowning your food in the cream sauce.)
Then I took a stick blender and blended it until smooth. Then I added a little salt and pepper. I served it with pasta and chicken. The hot paprikas added just the right hint of flavor and spiciness. I also tried this recipe at home with plain colored, sweet peppers. It was also tasty, but not with the same depth of flavor.
I had been looking for some good recipes to try with the Aji Limon (Lemon Drop) hot pepper all summer. A Peruvian friend said that for a true Peruvian experience, I needed to use these peppers to make ceviche. While I like fish, I’m not confident in my ability to purchase good enough quality fish in a landlocked state to make fresh ceviche. So I settled for this salsa recipe. (I also have a hot sauce recipe to try out another time.)
This recipe called for 8 oz. of the fresh Aji Limon peppers, 8 oz. of yellow bell pepper, 2 mangoes, brown sugar, and a bunch of vinegar and lime juice. I’ll be honest…I was afraid of how hot it might be.
The recipe didn’t say, so I decided to seed all the peppers. I chopped everything up, mixed it together, and tossed it into a saucepan. I let it cook until everything seemed soft and blendable.
At that point, I brought back the stick blender to smooth out the lumps.
After tasting, I would characterize this as a “hot” salsa. In other words, comparable to the heat level you might find if you buy a salsa labeled “hot.” If you regularly eat or enjoy spicy foods, this will be a nice salsa for you. If you are not into spicy foods, you will probably want to steer clear. That said, as with any salsa that contains a lot of brown sugar and mango, it is very tasty.
To use some of the Tabasco peppers, I was tempted to try making homemade tabasco sauce, but I decided to be kinder than that to my office mates. I settled for making a southern-style vinegar sauce.
I started with the Tabasco peppers. The fully ripe ones popped off the plant without the stems, which was handy. I washed them, and then slit them along the side.
When working with hot peppers, I strongly recommend wearing gloves! As much of a pain as it is, it isn’t as painful as getting capsaicin everywhere I don’t want it.
Then all I did was heat a cup and a half of white wine vinegar and pour it over the peppers in a jar. You could add garlic or peppercorns, but I decided to stay simple. I’ll give it a couple weeks to “steep” before trying the flavored vinegar.
Still to come in another post: the Espelette peppers, the Fushimi peppers, and dehydrating peppers.
Tomatoes: What Did Well, What Did Not
I’ve heard from a lot of gardeners this year that they had a poor tomato year. On one hand, I know that some of my tomato plants at home struggled as well. On the other hand, most of our plants in the Demo Garden did very well. My theory is that due to our rainfall this year, most average gardens were constantly losing nitrogen to leaching and the plants showed it. My plants at home were never as vigorous and lush as I would expect, and I blame it on lack of fertility.
Why did our Demo Garden tomatoes thrive? I think the fact that we incorporated 3-5″ of compost into the beds in the spring played an important role. We didn’t even add additional fertilizer, and the plants looked good all year long. I suspect that had we NOT had a rainy year, we would have had poor production due to excess nitrogen.
All that aside, we still had some obvious differences in our varieties this year.
Easy Winners
Esterina
I know I’ve mentioned this variety multiple times over the summer, so it can’t be much of a surprise that it turns up as an easy winner. The flavor is like eating candy, the plants were vigorous and prolific, and the fruit didn’t crack no matter what the weather did. If you like sweet cherry tomatoes, I can’t recommend this variety highly enough.
Good Performers
Beefy Boy
This is the second year that we had Beefy Boy in the garden. It performed well again this year. The fruit were good sized and the yield was also good. Again this year, there was some significant cracking. But…almost everything cracked this year, as most years.
Tiren
The Tiren tomatoes are the ones that are in the front, slightly to the right of center. Overall, I really liked this tomato. For a large-fruited roma, it was quite prolific and, in fact, still had fruit on it until late this fall. The fruit had very little seed gel, and the flavor was very good for a modern, hybrid roma. (Believe me, many hybrid romas are not so tasty!) The fruit shape was a little odd. The biggest complaint I have with the variety is that almost all the fruit had a small spot of blossom end rot. Now, this could be largely related to this year’s weather. Or it could be a common, every year occurrence. I didn’t hold it against the variety this year, but if it were to be the same or worse in other seasons, I would probably become less keen on the variety.
Orange Slice
This variety is another orange slicer, similar to the Chef’s Choice Orange that we grew last year. For whatever reason, I don’t have any good pictures of this variety. The tomato in the upper right corner of the above picture is one of the Orange Slice fruit, although not a fully ripe example.
This picture from the tasting day shows the bright orange color much better. It was the clear winner in our tasting with the Master Gardeners.
While it had good production, large fruit, and the same tendency to crack as most of the other varieties, I think I would probably prefer the Chef’s Choice Orange over this one. It’s hard to say when comparing one year to the next, but I think the Chef’s Choice was more prolific. Still, this was a good tomato.
Goliath Original
This is one of the “Goliath” series tomatoes, the Original, as you may have guessed. It typically has large fruit, about 16 oz. I would say that it performed very comparably to Orange Slice and Beefy Boy. From a flavor standpoint, I thought it was a little sweeter and less acidic than some of the other red varieties.
Worth Another Try, Sometime
Purple Bumblebee
This cherry tomato variety is part of the Artisan tomato series. It has a pink to maroon color with green stripes. For whatever reason, this plant was exceptionally vigorous (maybe too much compost?) and seemed to be not as productive for its size as you might wish. The flavor got mixed reviews. It was much more acidic and less sweet than others. I think the less-than-perfectly-ripe fruit were not as tasty, definitely. Still, it was a fun variety to try growing.
Lucky Tiger Cherry
I had high hopes for this variety, another in the Artisan series. Naturally, it was a bit disappointing. The Lucky Tiger Cherry was green with a red blush when ripe. Unfortunately, the result was ugly rather than attractive. This variety also cracked terribly and the plants succumbed to disease when most of the others did not. The yield was pretty good, but the flavor also left something to be desired. Highly acidic flavor, but not much else.
Verona
Verona was marketed as a tomato that was similar to Juliet but even tastier. Without having a true, side-by-side comparison, it is difficult to say for sure. However, Juliet rarely cracks. This variety cracked constantly. Not a good sign! The flavor was nice, but I would be hard pressed to say that it was better than a Juliet. The yield was good, but not the exceptional yield I expect from a Juliet. So…I wouldn’t call this variety the new, improved Juliet!
Not Worth It
Black Beauty
The only picture I have of this plant is from when it was newly transplanted. This variety set almost no fruit, the fruit set was late, and what fruit it did set was cracked and rotten before we could harvest or taste it. There is the chance that the excess compost played a role in the lack of productivity, but I’m going to be hard pressed to want to try this one again.
Early Doll
Another one with no pictures! This was supposed to be an improved variety of Early Girl, with an early days to maturity of 52 days. This plant didn’t have ripe fruit until well after most of the other varieties were producing. Could this have been a weather issue? Yes. So try it if you like, but I’m not overly keen to try it again.
Those are my thoughts on our regular garden tomatoes for this year. I’ll have another post to discuss the container varieties.
Hot Pepper Garden: What Did Well, What Did Not
I am finally returning to the task of reviewing our garden results this year. The next area is the hot pepper section of the garden. In general, I find that hot peppers do well here. However, because we had such a range of varieties, there are some differences in performance.
Easy Winners
Aji Amarillo
This Peruvian pepper was a little slow to get started, but once it did, the plant was vigorous, healthy, and prolific. The peppers were good quality with minimal signs of sunscald and the flavor was nice, citrusy, and spicy. A great choice if you are looking for a hot pepper with a different flavor profile.
Tabasco
The tabasco pepper plant enjoyed the hot summer and just kept on flowering, setting fruit, and ripening. I have to admit that we let way too many of these go to waste. However, if you want to make your own hot sauce, one of these plants should leave you well set. The plant got a little unruly and floppy late in the season, but that’s pretty normal.
Thai Chili
I’ve never grown a Thai Chili that was not ridiculously productive, and this year was no exception. If you want hot peppers for cooking spicy Asian foods, you cannot go wrong with a single Thai Chili plant. The plant was quite compact compared to most of the other hot peppers, but still very productive.
Good Performers
‘Leutschauer’ Paprika
I was pleasantly surprised with how well this heirloom paprika pepper performed. This was a hot/spicy paprika. While the yield was not overwhelming, it did produce steadily. The fruit was nice sized and good quality. While the plant was taller and a bit leggy, it didn’t have any trouble with breakage or splitting that other plants had.
I did try one of these fresh the other day, and they have quite a kick. I have also dried some in the dehydrator and made a red pepper creams sauce with them. All those things are for another post, however. I’m definitely planning to find more opportunities to try paprika peppers.
‘Flaming Flare’ Fresno
This pepper is an All America Selection and performed as expected. It had a good, consistent yield, nice fruit, relatively early fruiting, and a healthy, vigorous plant. It also didn’t experience any breakage, despite being relatively tall.
Hungarian Hot Wax
The Hungarian Hot Wax wasn’t quite as prolific as the sweet banana peppers on the other end of the garden, but for the relatively compact plant, the yield was quite good. It was also an early and consistent producer.
Sweet Heat
Another All America Selection, this plant seemed quite out of place on the hot pepper end of the garden because the plant was so compact. It was also an early, consistent producer, but I think the yield was depressed somewhat because it was so shaded by all of its neighbors.
Worth Another Try, Sometime
Feher Ozon Paprika
This pepper was rather interesting. It lost part of the plant early in the season and never really seemed to recover. It also set the first fruit extremely early, before the plant had gotten very big. Even though we picked off the first few fruit that set, it never got very big. So in comparison to the size of the plant and amount of foliage, the fruit set was quite impressive! Whether a variety problem or a weather problem, the small plant and heavy fruit set meant that it struggled to ripen the peppers. While we had a few turn red, many more stayed white. The white peppers were pretty much bland. This would be a good variety to try again another time.
Aleppo Pepper
This pepper was a bit disappointing. It had a couple times that a branch broke due to wind or weather. The fruit, while of good number and size, seemed much more prone to sunscald or other rotten spots. I would like to try this one again sometime, using a cage to support the plant and hopefully having a season that is a bit less rainy.
Not Worth It
Espelette Pepper
The biggest challenge of this pepper was that it was so tall, leggy, and brittle that the branches kept breaking off. Granted, we had some spectacular storms. If you were to try it, I would definitely recommend caging or staking or tying of some sort for support. Because the plant was constantly trying to rejuvenate itself, the yield wasn’t all that much.
Those are my thoughts on the hot peppers this year!
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