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Candied Cayenne Peppers

A few weeks ago my wife came home with 3 lbs of cayenne peppers from a farmers market she just happened to walk by. Aside from many, many jars of hot sauce, I wanted to take a shot at doing something creative with the cayennes.  
 
I figured I'd try to candy a few cayenne peppers and see how they turned out.  For some reason I decided use use maple syrup instead of sugar and they turned out pretty good!
 
Steps:
  • Preheat oven to 200F
  • Slice Cayennes into 1/4 inch thick slices.
  • Bring 1/2 cup maple syrup to a low boil using medium heat (be careful not to burn syrup).
  • Toss the pepper slices into syrup.
  • Cook peppers for about 3-5 minutes, stirring softly and often. Make sure the syrup doesn't burn or bubble over.
  • Once pepper slices start to look translucent, use a slotted spatula or a fork to gently pull them out of the pan and put on silicone mat or wax paper.
  • Put mat/wax paper on a cookie sheet and put peppers in the oven to cook. One hour in the oven will give you candies that have a slight crunch to them but are still chewy.  If you keep them in for another hour they will probably be brittle and crispy.  Just depends on what you like.
Obvious note: Keep the leftover syrup.  Its tasty!
 
I've noticed when making sauces that Cayenne peppers seem to have a high oil content.  My cayenne sauces have no added oil but they have a pleasant oily thickness and viscosity that my other sauces don't have.
 
This oil really came through in these little candies, giving them a pleasant buttery flavor.  This combined with the maple was really nice.
 
The heat of the peppers was fairly subdued from the cooking process (I guess). I'd like to try this with hotter peppers to get more heat, but I love the flavor of cayennes.  Next time I may put some habanero  powdered in the syrup to add some heat, but still use cayennes for the flavor. 
 
NOTE: I'll add pictures as soon as I figure out how!
 
 
 
Click to expand...
Fresh cayennes before candy making
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Candied Cayenne Peppers
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Looks nice!  If you like the candied chiles thing, you can also take the chiles when they come out of the boiling step, pack them in small jars (like small jelly jars) add some of the syrup and do a quick boiling water bath to seal them.  Makes for nice little sweet heat treats~  They are sorta soft, not chewy like you describe. 
 
The "loss of heat" in the chiles is probably due to the sugar.  Sugar is one of the capsaicin "antidotes".  We've noticed some situations where the same thing in the same amount is in 2 different mediums, one has sugar in it and the other one doesn't.  The one with the sugar in it seems noticeably less hot. 
 
I saw a post in here about candied habs and thought I'd give it a try.  I really liked the flavor that maple syrup added so I used two cups sugar and one cup maple.  
 
I cut the hab's placenta out of the pepper halves, but to raise the heat of the sugar mix I added the seeds and plecentas in with the sugar, then I brought it up to a boil.
 
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After cooking the habs at a very low boil (syrup temp was about 210F) for 8 - 10 min I pulled them out of the syrup mix and put them on a silicone baking sheet and then into the oven for an hour at 170F.  I'm using a convection oven to see if the air circulation will help dry them out while keeping oven temp low.
 
I did learn a useful tip this time.  Instead of trying to pull the peppers out of the syrup with a fork, I used chopsticks.  That was WAY easier and much more precise.  Super easy to pick up a pepper by the stem side and let any excess syrup drip off.
 
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I also poured the syrup through a strainer to pull out the seeds and other bits.  Cant wait to taste it once it cools a bit.  I'll post a pic of the habs once they are out of the oven.
 
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Just a quick update: I couldn't wait any longer, so I dipped a spoon in the maple/sugar syrup and gave it a taste.  OMG!  That is so tasty!  It has a great maple flavor, despite only being 1/3 maple syrup, and it's kind of buttery.  The heat is very pronounced, and it hits you in a way I can only describe as silky smooth.  Its kind of like a gourmet spicy Mrs Butterworth.
 
I wonder what kind of shelf life this will have?  Do I need to refrigerate it?  Will it crystalize in the frig?
 
This syrup would be a great ingredient for a whisky based cocktail.  Probably best with a bourbon or rye, but maybe a mid-range scotch blend like Jonny Black.  I'll have to play with that this weekend.  Off the top of my head I'm thinking:
 
1.5 oz small batch bourbon
0.5 tsp hab infused maple syrup
0.5 oz good quality apple schnapps (NOT pucker!)
small dash of cinnamon 
Shake with only a few ice cubes to help incorporate the syrup
 
After two hours in the oven at 170F (its the lowest our oven will go) the tops of the habs were nice has brittle, but the bottoms were still bendy and saturated with syrup.  So I flipped them over and am putting them in for another hour.  Again, using chopsticks made this process way easier than using a fork would have been.
 
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