Preserving capsicums

"It is not possible to have too many sweet peppers."

Hank Shaw/Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook

Oh yes it is. Yesterday I stupidly bought this - a bag of - in my case - red capsicums. A kilo of them. So at the moment I feel that yes it is possible to have too many of them. I mean they go off fairly quickly don't they? But they are expensive - really pretty expensive, when they used to be cheap, so finding some that were cheaper - not exactly cheap - was too much of a temptation for my frugal shopping self.

"No other plant demands so much, gives so little, yet keeps us coming back for more."

says our Hunter, gardener, angler, cook - although he is talking about the gardening bit, but Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall sort of nails it: "they are catwalk swanky. Just don't forget to eat them." The 'catwalk swanky' bit is why I bought them. They look so gorgeous.

So I succumbed. There are of course opportunities for capsicum heavy dinners but really I need to preserve at least some of them before they go off? But how?

There are options with varying degrees of time that they will keep for. Of course there are options. And even if I had no cookbooks or the internet, I could probably work out a couple of them. But first I looked to see what people actually do.

My first thought was to simply preserve roasted and peeled ones in large chunks in a jar - like you buy in the shops. I could try and wing it, but thought I should probably check whether I really knew what to do. And I found a few ways to do it.

The first is a variation of Pam Corbin's asparagus preserved in oil - alas the recipe is not online but it's pretty simple. I can also vouch for it as I did do this with asparagus a year or so ago and they were delicious. I should do some more - it is asparagus season after all. But you need a tall jar. And she does suggest using the same method for grilled peppers or lightly cooked artichoke hearts. So I assume you could roast your peppers and peel them first - or not - if you are lazy and like them with the skins on.

For 500g you roast or grill your capsicum then bring 300 ml vinegar with 200ml water to a boil, then cover to keep warm - she suggests cider or white wine - but maybe red wine for the capsicum. Drop the peppers into the vinegar and leave for 3-4 minutes. Put two thirds of 2 sliced garlic or shallots in a sterilised 500ml jar remove your capsicums from the vinegar and pack into the jar. Add a few herbs - she suggests rosemary, thyme or basil, then pour over 2/3 of 100 ml lemon juice cover and seal. Repeat with the rest of the capsicum and flavourings in a smaller jar. Obviously with capsicum you have more leeway with the size of the jars, but you can adjust those extra flavourings.

But I also found two other preserving recipes - Roasted peppers preserved in chilli oil - Larder Love and How to preserve peppers - Hank Shaw/Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook

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So I might give them a try with a couple of the capsicum. Basically I think you need some vinegar and also oil with flavourings to taste - or not.

Then there is jam and chutney. I looked at several recipes for capsicum jam, but decided in the end, that really they were recipes for chilli jam with a touch of capsicum, rather than the other way round, and also they seemed to have very little use other than in sandwiches and suchlike. And we don't do many of them in this house - although why is that? I should explore that notion sometime. And the jams also seemed a little sweet.

However, there is chutney - and herewith two versions - one Indian Capsicum chutney - Swasthi's Recipes, and one from Woolworths - Capsicum chutney which looks to be a possibility, although neither of them look to be very long keeping:

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Then I found that Ottolenghi was selling jars of Jammy peppers, which looked pretty good, but I couldn't find a recipe online - so I looked at the ingredient list to see if I could guess how to do it:

Olive Oil, Onion, Red Peppers, Salt Garlic, Tomato Paste, Brown Sugar, Dried Oregano, Chipotle Chillies, Black Peppers, Cider Vinegar (Sulphites). And then I realised there was no need because in the OTK cookbook Extra Good Things, those same jammy peppers are the extra good thing in his recipe for Black beans and rice which you can find on the Jono and Jules website.

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Well if it's good enough to bottle and sell then it's good enough to make yourself is it not?

And finally there are the condiments which merge into dips, and which I suspect don't keep that long but which can be used in a myriad of ways. The most common of these is Muhummara and this is represented by Greg Malouf on the Please Pass the Recipe website; next most common Spanish romescu sauce - represented by Nagi Maehashi of Recipe Tin Eats and the third in this representative set is Ajvar from Yotam Ottolenghi/The Guardian. And then there's pesto as well - well a kind of pesto because the capsicums would dominate the herbs.

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I had initially thought I would make up my own of this kind of thing. Collect some appropriate things together, chuck them in a blender and whizz. And I may still do this. Sun-dried tomatoes, preserved lemons, some kind of chilli or chilli mix, garlic, preserved lemons, coriander ...? Not very original - indeed I feel a bit ashamed of listing those ingredients - but must remind myself that when I was young something like this would have been incredibly exotic and blenders didn't exist.

But I must take care to make whatever I decide on look good. Not too much green because:

"Remember, the eyes eat first! A murky brown sauce is nowhere near as exciting to eat as a rich orange one." Southside Kitchen

And I will use them for cooking too. Maybe a nostalgic Yugoslavian sausage stew or Robert Carrier's Pollo alla Romana, or even Delia's Piedmontese peppers.

Something with peppers and mandarins? I have a lot of mandarins too. Maybe they would be a good match in a chutney. Yes, might go and give that a go now.

I almost forgot - Ixta Belfrage's Charred red pepper pimenta - which in her book Fusão she serves with Fried greens - the recipe being a blend of: grilled red romano peppers (4) and scotch bonnet chilli (1); 2 small garlic cloves, 40g rice vinegar, 2 tbsp olive oil, 1/2 tsp fine sea salt and 20 twists of ground black pepper. Or - not a preserve, but a brilliant looking way to use the peppers for Omelette noodles with red pepper sauce from her book Meczla, the recipe for which is on the Hokey Stokey website. She is just so inventive.

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YEARS GONE BY

September 22

2025 - A dustbin omelette

2024 - A Turkish? salad - collected or created?

2023 - Lush - Welsh food

2022 - Normality - a Coles shop

2021 - Missing

2020 - Missing

2019 - Red cabbage

2018 - Cooking with beer

2017 - "Eating breakfast of warm flatbread and honey in the open air". A lucky dip

2016 - Winnie-the-Pooh and Toad-in-the-hole