Fun With Capsaicin

On a rainy night devoid of baseball, what's a bored urban creature to do?

Why roast peppers, of course!

Frequent readers of the IlkBlog will recall that back in May, I picked up a bunch of hot pepper plants at Home Depot with the eventual goal of turning them into hot sauce. While fearing the worst and hoping for the best, I potted them on the deck right around Memorial Day and let them grow.

Oh, did they grow. The deck gets a hell of a lot more afternoon sunlight in summer than I could ever antcipate, and before I knew it, the plants were sprouting. I watered them every afternoon, and they got all kinds of big, green and peppery. The peppers sprouted, and by the 4th of July I had a handful of them that were ready to be picked. (see pic above)

Since it's way too damned nice out and I'm way too damned busy to spend any time making hot sauce now, I found out the best way to preserve the peppers until fall would be to roast them. They'd been on the counter for a couple weeks, and I was beginning to fear that they'd turn funky soon.

Alton Brown may be a fruitcake who annoys the piss out of me with his food chemistry and his prancing around the kitchen, but the guy knows his stuff when it comes to technique. Alton taught me that the best way to roast my peppers without blowing the house up was to use a vegetable steamer directly over a gas burner.

I tried that. For about five minutes. My peppers didn't blacken, they just made a bunch of odd popping noises and started to smell like marihuana reefer cigarettes. Fueled by a desire to speed up the process, I decided to opt for the more traditional method (at least the one that got the most Google hits) of using tongs and just holding the pepper right over the flame.

The latter method worked like a charm...but believe it or not, you do get a sore hand from doing a whole bunch of peppers. I let them steam in a plastic bag for about 20 minutes, and then peeled off the burned skin before slicing them open with the precision of a surgeon and scraping the seeds and membranes out, leaving me with some very nice pepper pieces. They're safe in the fridge now, waiting for football season.