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storage Freezing Peppers

T

TBASSPEPPER

Well, it took a while but I now have my pepper plants going wild. I am picking almost every other day. Making sauces and using them every way possible along with giving them to family and friends. This may be a stupid question but is there any certain way for freezing peppers that works best. Any help would be appreciated.
 
If you're going to freeze them whole or sliced or diced, the best way to do it is as fast as possible. The faster you can freeze them, the smaller the ice crystals will be and the less chance of freezer burn. You do this by lowering the thermostat in your freezer as low as it will go (do that the day before), and by allowing as much circulation around the peppers as possible while they are freezing. The easiest way to do that is by placing the peppers on a cooling rack, spacing the peppers apart so they don't touch each other, and placing the cooling rack in the freezer so that there is adequate air flow over AND under the peppers.

This is a pretty good tutorial on the process...


 
If you're looking to make sauces then freezing will definitely do the trick. For anything else I find them pretty much useless. They never come out of the freezer the same as they went in, especially if you're looking to maintain fresh crunchy peppers.

Make sure the bags are freeze lock or vacuum seal as well and they'll keep as well as they can.

Freeze for future sauces, or dry out for future powders.
 
Not sue what everyone else does but I tend to vac seal them after cutting them.have had good luck so far.A lil ALUM will help in the brew to keep them a lil crunchier. good luck
 
Ballzy, I could be wrong, but I think he's referring to Aluminum Potassium Sulfate. Also know as Alum...


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alum

It's often used by the pinch in pickle recipes. Also the stuff you often see tweety sprinkle on sylvester's lips in the old WB Tweety bird cartoons to make his lips pucker so tight he can't fit the bird in his mouth!
 
I freeze most chinenses whole, but larger peppers I cut into strips or slices and vaccuum seal or zip-lock. I usually don't have a problem with the texture since I usually use my frozen pods for cooking with or for future dehydrating.
 
I rinse, pop the stem, into freezer bag, suck out all the air and into the freezer. When I get enough for a few trays into the dehydrator they go.

Going to do the AJ thing here soon too. Make some concentrated paste. For that I'm going to use fresh I think.
 
I dry em and seal individual varieties in sandwich bags, then place the sandwich bags inside gallon freezer bags and store in the freezer.

Anybody say overkill. :lol:
 
Is the slit necessary when freezing whole chinenses? What will happen if you don't do that? Also, is it better to freeze in a ziplock or on a tray then bag them?
 
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