PlanterTomato Vegetable Gardening

Some Like It Hot: Growing & Preserving Serrano Chili Peppers

This year I grew serrano peppers and have been very pleased with the results.  Here's the information you need to grow, preserve and use these wonderful little chili peppers.

A Medium Hot Pepper

The serrano pepper is a chili that grows to a length of about 2 inches.  Initially green, Serrano peppers turn orange and then red as they ripen.  As with other peppers, you can use Serranos in either their green or red stage of developement, but if you want to dry these peppers you should wait till they are red as this is when the peppers have the least amount of moisture in their skins.

Hot peppers are rated using a scale called the Scovile Index.  For perspective, Tabasco Sauce has a Scoville rating of 700, Jalapeno peppers are 2,500-8,000 and the incredibly hot and famous Scotch Bonnet pepper comes in at a whopping 100,000-350,000 Scoville.  Serrano peppers have a Scoville rating of 10,000-23,000 Scoville, so they are pretty hot and definitely not for kids.

By the way, if you want to turn-down the heat a little, slice open the pepper and remove the white membrane and seeds from the inside of the pepper.  Much of the heat is contained in this white membrane. 

Growing Serrano Peppers

I found it easy to grow these peppers and got a  yeild of about 2.5 pounds of peppers from each plant.  If you are growing peppers in containers, use a 5 gallon pot so the plant does not become root bound. Pepper like warm temperatures, so place your peppers in a place where they will receive lots of sunlight.   These peppers grow 2-3 feet high and can be bushy, so plan to support your plants with stakes or cages. 

Serrano peppers take 10-20 days to germinate and will yield green peppers in about 60 days and red pepper in 80-100 days.

Using Serrano Peppers

Serranos are normally eaten fresh and are a key ingredient in Salsa.  We like using them as a topping on pizza, chili and other dishes. Just thinly slice the serrano peppers and add to your food to give it a nice kick.

As parents of young children, we often find ourselves cooking relatively tame versions of many recipes.  For example, we like to make Thai style ramen noodle soup with chicken.  We cook this without any hot seasonings so the kids will eat it, but us parents add serranos to our bowls at the table.  This allows my wife and I to further "customize" the heat to meet our individual taste preferences. 

Preserving Serrano Peppers

Serranos are generally eaten fresh and are a key ingredient in salsa and other Mexican dishes.  However, we can't consume all the peppers at harvest time, so I preserve them by both freezing and drying them.  Whether you are drying or freezing, remember to discard any peppers that are soft or have any mold on them.

• Freezing - normally, you blanche veggies before freezing, but serranos are fairly thin walled, so we just put the green or red peppers in a food storage bag and toss them into the freezer. When we need them, they are easy to remove from the bag and thaw.
• Drying - We also dried a portion of the red Serranos using our food dehydrator. We then store these in a mason jar.  If you don't have a dedicated food dehydrator, don't despair.  You can dry peppers in your oven.  Wash your peppers, dry them off, and then cut them in half lengthwise to speed the drying process.  Place the peppers on an oven rack and leave them in the oven at 135-150 degrees Fahrenheit for 6-8 hours (leave your oven door ajar to let moisture escape).  When done, they should feel leathery and very dry to the touch.                                                                                                                                                       I like the look of whole peppers and don't bother splitting them prior to drying.  However, I have the luxury of using a food dehydrator; drying whole, unsplit, peppers takes much longer.  I find it generally takes several days to dry them this way, so this is probably not practical if you are using your oven.  Please note, peppers give off fumes as they dry which can be irritating to your eyes.  The seriousness of this will depend on the heat of your peppers, your sensitivity and the ventilation in  your kitchen.

If you have a favorite recipe that calls for chili peppers, please send it to me and I'll post it for readers of this blog.

Japanese Shishito Peppers

Tiny peppers from Japan with little to no heat.

If you've ever eaten Tempura, a Japanese dish where seafood and vegetables are lightly battered and fried, you probably were served green pepper as one of the vegetables.  In the U.S. the green peppers used are generally the standard green bell pepper that you can buy in any grocery store or farmers market. 

In Japan, tempura is often made with a tiny green pepper called shishi-togarashi.  The name, which means "lion pepper," is often abbreviated as shishi-to.  It's a thin walled green pepper with a wrinkled skin measuring about 3 inches long.   Generally shishi-to is a very mild pepper, but it is possible to get one with a bit more heat every now and then.  That said, it's never really hot like a serrano or other chili pepper.

In Japan, shishi-to is eaten as part of tempura, used in yaki-tori (grilled chicken kabobs) or just fried without breading and served with a little salt.  This is how I plan to eat them, but I think the shishi-to can be incorporated into any western recipe that calls for green bell pepper.  It might make a particularly nice pepper for salads because its so small you don't need to cut it up.  Alternatively, it might make be a good pickler because of its small size.

When I lived in Japan I ate shishi-to frequently, so I decided to try growing them in my garden this year.  One grows shishi-to like any other pepper; just sow the seeds in the late spring and they mature in about 60 days.   I grew mine in containers in my greenhouse and they produced large quantities of lovely little peppers.

I've always eaten shishi-to when they were green.  Growing these for the first time, I got a pleasant surprise because I discovered that when left to mature, shishi-to turn red like many other peppers.  I tasted the mature red pepper and they don't differ much in flavor from the peppers in their immature green state.  The red peppers are a bit more dry as one would expect with an older pepper.

If you want to grow shishi-to peppers in your garden next spring, you can order seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.