I’m a bit late with this post; I pickled and canned these jalapeños in late September, and I am finally finishing up this blog post. I thought about saving it for next year; however, I wanted to get it done. Now you will have a recipe and reference ready to go when it’s your turn to pickle some jalapeños.

 

I have been pickling and canning jalapeños for more than forty years. For the last thirty years, it has almost always been the “bread and butter” style jalapeños I am writing about in this post.

 

My friends and family are smitten by these jalapeños; I have brought jars to my brother in Spain and my other brother in Maine. My sister, wherever she is living at the time- Saratoga, San Francisco, Cincinnati, or her most current location, Alexandria- always requests a jar or two to tide her over until we see each other again. I also gift them to my nieces and nephews. Shane, my son, always grabs a jar or 2 out of the basement for his college apartment.

 

This is also the deal with my good friend Mark Mcloskey, from Drogheda, Ireland. When he first tried them about 5 years ago, he was so enamored with them he insisted I give him the recipe; of course, I complied. A couple of phone calls and WhatsApp conversations about my process followed that. I am not sure if he ever attempted to make them in Ireland, though.

 

Finally, this year, after I urged him to cross the pond so I could show him firsthand how to make them, He gave in. Using pickling 40 pounds of jalapeños as an excuse to come to my house for a week.

 

We spent most of a day with the jalapeños, leaving the rest of the week for us to have fun, which was a well-conceived plan.

 

A Mt. Joy concert, one of my favorite new-ish bands, at the Boston Garden. We spent a day in Portland, ME, with my brother Dennis, who Mark is also friends with, Dennis’ wife Jodi, and some other friends who also joined us. We followed that with a few days in Moultonborough, NH, visiting with friends, cooking lobsters, and checking out my brother-in-law John’s cool collection of old Harley-Davidson motorcycles. We also took advantage of the beautiful autumn weather by boating on Lake Winnipesaukee. I can’t forget to mention that we drank a lot of wine, and I do mean copious amounts. 

 

 

Grilled lobster with corn,

little tomatoes, tarragon, and butter. It didn’t suck.

 

Mark enjoying the beauty of Lake Winnipausekee.

 

 

Back to the subject of this blog. Preserving the season: jalapeños. As I mentioned previously, I made mine in September; however, it’s probably too late to make some of these this year. Local farms may still have a few jalapeños that you could grab; there are usually some chili peppers around until we get a serious frost or they sell out.

 

In my opinion, late season is the best time to pickle peppers, whether it be jalapeños or any other variety. The late-season jalapeños are bigger, easier to cut, more colorful, with lots of the riper red jalapeños in the mix, and they tend to be a bit milder.

 

Here’s how we made ours.

 

I pre-arranged with David, the owner of Kimball Fruit Farm, to bring me a bushel of jalapeños to the Arlington farmers’ market.

 

We started by giving the jalapeños a good rinse in cold water.

 

Then we carefully slice the jalapeños; I find using a Japanese mandolin the easiest way to get nice, consistent cuts. I also always wear vinyl gloves to help avoid the chili pepper sting that can be bothersome to your hands as well as other parts of your body, which you will inevitably touch. Above, Mark is demonstrating proper technique.

 

As we were cutting the jalapeños, we decided that we would use the tops and scraps to make some hot sauce. Since we had both red and green jalapeños, we decided to make 2 different hot sauces. The red one would be acidic, with the addition of tomatoes, onions, garlic, and white wine vinegar. The green one would be sweet, made with the same brine we were using for the sliced jalapeños.

 

Next, we gave the sliced jalapeños a good soak in some cold water, agitating them a bit to loosen the seeds. The seeds will sink, and the slices will float. It’s good to remove most of the seeds; they are often too spicy and, even worse, get caught in your teeth when eating them.

Wash and sterilize the jars and the threaded rings; be sure to use new flat tops every time.

 

A big issue when canning is that if the ingredients in the jars are too cold when you put them into the pot of boiling water, as the ingredients in the jars heat, they will expand and possibly break the jars. This has happened to me too many times, until I figured out a system to eliminate this problem. You can’t just place the cold / room temperature jalapeno slices in the jar; you need to heat them first. The problem with this is that you don’t want to cook the jalapeños too much; they’ll end up mushy. I want the jalapeños to have a bit of a snap to them.

 

So, what I have figured out is that I take some of the boiling hot brine and pour it over the sliced jalapeños, cover them, and let them sit for a few minutes. If you are making more jars than you can fit in your canning pot at one time, you need to do this in batches. I then strain them, reserving the liquid to use in the next batch.

 

From here, I jam the hot jalapeños into the jars; I do mean jam. You need to completely fill the jars, pushing just about as many as you can get into them. After this, each jar needs to be inverted and strained of the “heating-up” brine that may have made it into the jars. This brine is watered down and weak from sitting with the jalapeños, extracting liquid from them, and would make the final product weak if you don’t strain it completely.

Now it’s time to add the fresh, full-strength, boiling hot brine to the jars. I have found that if you need to add more than one and a half cups of hot brine to each jar, you didn’t pack in enough jalapeños.

 

When the jars are full, put the tops on so that they are snug and not too tight. Remember, for the canning to work, any air that’s in the jar will need to escape; if the lids are too tight, it will inhibit this from happening.

 

 

Place the jars in a pot of gently boiling water for 15 minutes. Carefully remove the jars, setting them aside for several hours. At some point, the tops will pop; this is often audible. After the lids pop and the jars have cooled enough to handle, you can tighten the tops. If any of the tops have a bounce to them, it means that the canning did not work and that there is still air in the jar. Don’t worry, just place it in the refrigerator and use that jar first.

 

 

All done, ready to be put up in the basement for use throughout the year. 

 

Over the years, I have used the jalapeño tops to make hot sauce. This hot sauce was a main ingredient in EVOO’s chicken sausage, which was on the lunch menu for more than a decade. At home, I have already used this year’s hot sauces: the red as a drizzle over some grilled salmon and as an ingredient in jalapeño cheese dip. The green has been mixed into mayonnaise for a sweet n spicy hamburger topping.

 

Mark took copious amounts of notes; he should have no problem replicating our process at home in Ireland.

Keep in mind, you don’t have to can the jalapeños. At Za, we make 5-gallon buckets full of them. It’s the same recipe until you get to the canning bit. Instead, wash, cut, and rinse the jalapeños; place the slices into a bucket and pour the hot brine on top. Let the jalapeños come to room temperature, cover, and refrigerate. That’s it; they’ll be good to go in about a week and will last a few months with no problem.

 

Here’s the recipe for the brine; this should be enough brine for about 5 pounds of jalapeños: 1/2 gallon cider vinegar, 1/2 gallon sugar, 4 ts turmeric, 4 ts yellow mustard seeds, 2 ts celery seeds. Put everything into a stainless steel pot and bring to a boil; stir frequently to dissolve the sugar.