surplus chillies and basil - any suggestions?

K

Kali

Hi there,

My small garden has produced a LOT of chillies, different varieties, with many more to come, mostly all very hot. I also have a lot of sweet basil growing. As I will be going away for 5 weeks, I thought I might try to combine the two (basil and chilli) in some way so as to preserve them (I don't think the basil will be great once I get back).
Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm a bit short of time, so won't be able to use very complicated recipes.
I also have a lot of marjoram and sage, but these should last until I get back.
I have been drying most of my chillies thus far, but would like to try something new - sauce, paste etc.
it would be great to use the basil somehow, as I would hate to waste it (I am not planning on drying the basil).
I have seen a Thai basil and chilli paste advertised, but cannot find a recipe for it.
Any suggestions will be very welcome. Thank you.
 
chilli pesto.... add some nuts (pine nuts or cashews etc) to the basil, oil garlic lime or lemon juice, salt, pepper and chilli peppers blitz
you want it to be a thickish paste.. have a play around with it and maybe do a google on pesto recipes, thats what I'd do.
 
+1 on the pesto! Also drying and grinding peppers is a great way to preserve them.

Refridgerated in vinegar is good too.
 
pesto sounds like a great plan! Not sure how many chillies it would use up though, mine are really very hot this year.
w.r.t. keeping them in vinegar - any old vinegar OK *sorry, foreign keyboard, cannot find question mark
any preparation before putting into vinegar, e.g. blanch etc*
I will definitely be grinding some of the dried ones, maybe experiment with various spices, but I would also like to do some things with the fresh fruit. I once made a sauce that contained mango and kiwi, was very pleased with it, but am keen to try some new things.
 
Make the basil pesto and freeze it. You can play with adding the peppers when you have more time. I make pesto and put it in ice cube trays. Once it's frozen, you can pop it out and put it in little baggies to save space. Go a little light on the olive oil when you're going to freeze it so you can add a bit when you thaw it out.
 
I prefer white vinegar myself. No need to blanch if you are going to keep it chilled. You can also add garlic or onions if you want. My favorite ones right now are some orange habs.

Last harvest had about 40 orange pods and 17 green ones with no hope of ripening. I smoked/grilled the green ones and tossed them in with the raw orange ones in white vinegar. It has an incredible smoky flavor, great in salsa.
 
I use a really simple pesto recipe for my basil and make it in a food processor:

1 cup of sweet basil (reasonably well packed cup)
60g parmesan cheese
30g roasted pine nuts
2 cloves fresh garlic
1/2 cup (approx) olive oil
Pinch of salt
(Chilli to taste!)

Put basil, garlic(, chilli) and roasted pine nuts in the processor, turn it on and slowly add a little oil. When the basil is all chopped up, add parmesan and continue to process and add oil until it is the desired consistency.

When done, I usually put it into smallish containers and put a layer of olive oil over the top. Keeps for a couple of weeks like this, but you could freeze it too. ::):

(OK, so I ripped this one off Stephanie Alexander, but it's pretty good.)

RS
 
ok, thanks to all the pesto talk, I went ahead and made some. This has taken care of most of the basil but, due to the unexpected heat of my perennial (and normally mildest) chilli, there are still plenty of those left (remember, partner does not enjoy hot food much). I've dried the rest of the ripe red ones, but the bushes are still quite full of green ones that will ripen while I am away. A friend will come and pick them periodically and put them in the freezer. Do they lose their texture once frozen?
I made a small batch of chilli 'seasoning' today, grinding up dried chillies with cumin, coriander, black pepper and dried ginger. I'm quite happy with the combination, but if anyone has any suggestions for additional ingredients, I'm all ears. I used a normal hand-held food-processor of sorts to do it, as my (ex-coffee) grinder is in for repairs, so it did not grind things that finely, and now i'm left with a mix of seeds and biggish flakes. Not sure what to do with that. should probably have removed the seeds before grinding. But they are probably still viable for germinating, so maybe i should keep them for that?
I'm also experimenting with hanging some of them, strung together (rista/ristra?) in our braai (barbeque) with the hope that it will pick up some of the smoke flavour from the wood when we braai. But we've only braaied twice since, and not likely to do so again for a while, so this might be a bit of a futile experiment. I do not have the equipment to smoke them for +/- 7 hours, as suggested for chipotles. Does anyone know of any shortcuts to smoking them?
 
what about a mortor and pestle for grinding ingredients by hand?


chili sambal
add chillis garlic ginger lime juice palm sugar or brown sugar maybe some lemon grass or corriander what ever you got...blitze and refrigerate. teaspoon to cooking etc
the recipe above is very vaguely thai in originso good for stir fry etc you could make an Indian one by adding cummin etc various pastes for different styles of cooking.
IF the partner dosn't like chilli add paste to food aftter you serve theirs up and mix through. .

Mick
 
I grilled my green habs at the end of last season and added them to the vinegar with my ripe ones. It turned out delicious!
 
the chllies i have growing: (copied and pasted directly from my welcome page)
The known ones are cayenne, habanero (first time, do they always grow so slowly?), peter pepper and one limon (still babies)and jalapeno.
then there are the unknown species from fruit bought at veggie shop. One type grows into a small tree, my oldest one is 3, it is small rounded and pointy on one end upright growing fruit that goes from green to dark almost black to red, very hot, it looks like a Beslers cherry http://www.thechileman.org/results.p...&submit=Search
no idea whether it is.
and a few other oddities including one with nice big long fruit which was quite mild last year, but pretty hot this year, as well as a supposed sweet pepper which bore about one insignificant fruit last year, but is now full of hot fruit similar in shape to jalapeno but bigger. I have also tried to grow peppadews from bought fruit, but not sure what it will produce yet.
I will do my best to get some pics that i took this morning posted, just need to figure out how exactly.
 
Nice to see pictures kali, your link works fine. You can always check your link works by clicking on it when you preview your post, just saves you editing afterwards if it dosen't.
 
back from "sabbatical", harvest not so good

ok, i'm back from where i've been. sadly, the weather has not been too great, add to that that some plants grew exceptionally well, thereby obscuring the sun from several of the chile plants, so that my expected harvest on my return has been somewhat dissapointing. nevertheless, there were a few harvestable fruits. the habaneros have been chowed by some hardy caterpillar (caught in the act), but things seem to be under control again now.

I took some advice from comments in this thread, plus added some other suggestions, as usual, and ended up picking most of my ripe chillies before leaving, cooking them in water for about 5 min, drained them, roasted them on a griddle pan until charred, then putting into a bottle/jar with white wine vinegar;some fine sugar, roasted coriander seed, bay/laurel leaf; pepper and some garlic. I left it at home while i went on my trip (not in fridge), and had the first taste the night i came home. it was really, really good. It managed to tone down the really hot aspect of the peppers, but still kept the hotness, if that makes any sense. Most of the chillies i have at the moment are so hot that i can hardly ever use more than half at a time in a dish for two, and then i'd be pushing it. Hot/heat is fine, but if the flavour is obscured, i'm not sure that i see the point of growing my own, might as well use store-bought hot stuff. anyone agree/disagree? would love to hear from you.

i also dried and ground up some of them with a bit of cumin, coriander, white pepper and a small amount of ginger (my favoutite spices), and took it with me. there was general consensus that this "satan's spawn" (or Satan, for short, as they called it), was an indispensable ingredient of field food. so now i am obviously inspired to make a couple of good chillie based seasonings. if anyone has any suggestions, i'd love to hear from them.
one question springs to mind immediately - would adding salt cause problems with clogging?
 
Kali said:
ok, i'm back from where i've been. sadly, the weather has not been too great, add to that that some plants grew exceptionally well, thereby obscuring the sun from several of the chile plants, so that my expected harvest on my return has been somewhat dissapointing. nevertheless, there were a few harvestable fruits. the habaneros have been chowed by some hardy caterpillar (caught in the act), but things seem to be under control again now.
Click to expand...

Good, and the nice thing about peppers is that they'll bounce back once you correct the shading problem.

i also dried and ground up some of them with a bit of cumin, coriander, white pepper and a small amount of ginger (my favoutite spices), and took it with me.
Click to expand...


That does sound good. Did you dry and grind your own ginger?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top