Fresh Pickled Jalapeños
Of course you can buy pickled jalapeños, and I have for years. But this year after I grew a few jalapeño plants in my garden, I was surprised at how many peppers I had.
Fresh jalapeños are good, and you can roast them, stuff them, or dice them in dishes. But the flavor is more like a normal pepper. Sort of like a hot bell pepper.
So to get that special jalapeño flavor from my home-grown peppers, or from fresh jalapeño peppers from the produce section of the market, I searched for a recipe that I could experiment with.
The recipes I found were expecting you to pickle and can the peppers, so they would stay preserved for a long time. You can do that if you want, but all I wanted was to keep my own jar in the fridge to snack from. If you really want to preserve them, follow the last instruction, which calls for cooking the sealed jars in boiling water for 10 minutes before you cool them.
You need to make two mixtures; one to flavor the contents, and the other to brine them with:
Starting with fresh peppers, stab a little hole in them so they don’t collapse. Then blanch them in boiling water for about three minutes. Drain the peppers.
In a pint jar that you fill with the peppers, add the following ingredients to the peppers:
INGREDIENTS
1 finely chopped garlic clove
1/2 teaspoon onion flakes (or powder)
2 bay leaves
1/8 teaspoon ground oregano
1/8 teaspoon ground thyme
1/8 teaspoon ground marjoram
1 tablespoon olive oil
Now mix together and bring to a boil:
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
4 tablespoons salt
2 cups water
2 cups vinegar
INSTRUCTIONS
Pour the boiling brine over the peppers, close the container, and let cool. If you are canning them, process the container for 10 minutes in boiling water after closing the container.
To my surprise, the peppers were ready to eat the next day, although they continued to get better with time.