Home-made Cayenne Pepper
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the peppers
Remove the stalks from the chili peppers and place the pods in a colander.
Set the colander in front of a fire for about 12 hours until the peppers are dry.
Grind and sift
Transfer the dried peppers to a mortar and add ¼ cup of coarse sea salt.
Pound and rub the mixture until it is as fine as possible.
Sift through a little muslin, then pound the residue and sift again.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Chili peppers
- Provide the heat, color and flavor that make up the powder.
- Coarse sea salt
- Helps draw moisture from the dried peppers and aids in grinding them finer.
The step that matters
Pound and sift until very fine. Peppers that stay coarse give an uneven texture and heat. Repeated sifting and re-pounding of the residue breaks up pieces that did not pass through the muslin on the first pass, so the powder is consistent.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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