Raw peppers are a healthy snack, pickled in vinegar they go well with grilled and briefly roasted meat. You can cook paprika yourself at home without much effort. The vegetables can then be stored for about a year.
Peppers combine well with other vegetables
Put the peppers in jars
If you want to preserve peppers, you first need suitable glasses that have to be sterilized. For example, medium-sized twist-off glasses or glasses with a swing top are well suited. Boil the glasses in water or place them in the oven at 100 degrees for ten minutes.
Then prepare the peppers and the other ingredients, such as vinegar and spices of your choice.
- Use red, yellow, or green sweet peppers. You can also mix the different varieties, then the preserving jars become eye-catchers in the pantry.
- Clean the peppers, i.e. the vegetables are stemmed, cored and quartered. The white inner skins are also cut out.
- Wash the quarters under running water.
- Place the peppers in the mason jars.
- Prepare a decoction of water, vinegar, salt and sugar.
- Boil the whole thing and pour it over the vegetables while it is still hot.
- Seal the jars.
This simple take on canned peppers can be modified to suit your tastes. An example is sweet and sour peppers. Prepare the vegetables as described, but change the broth. In addition to the vinegar, water, salt and sugar, add onions, garlic cloves, a sprig or two of fresh thyme, some mustard seed, a bay leaf and a few juniper berries. The broth is boiled again and poured hot over the peppers.
In addition to the peppers, you can also add a few carrot slices, small cauliflower florets or pieces of celery.
Boiling the jars
When the jars are filled with vegetables and poured with broth to the brim, they are sealed and boiled down. Here you can choose between two options, the preserving machine or the oven.
In the preserving machine, the jars should be half in the water and not too close together. The preserving temperature here is around 90 degrees and the preserving time is 30 minutes.
In the oven, the glasses are in the dripping pan filled with water. After preheating at around 150 degrees, the temperature is reduced to 90 degrees and the jars are also boiled for half an hour.
After the end of the cooking time, the glasses remain in the water for a while, about another half hour. Then let them cool down completely on the worktop under a cloth.
It is best to store the glasses in a dark and cool pantry. Let the vegetables soak for a week or two before tasting them for the first time.