Home-made Cayenne Pepper
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Remove the stalks from the chili peppers and place the pods in a colander.
Set the colander over the fire for about 12 hours until the peppers are dry.
Grind and sift
Transfer the dried peppers to a mortar, add the coarse sea salt, and pound until as fine as possible.
Sift the mixture through 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, flavour and colour that define the powder.
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws out moisture during pounding and helps preserve the finished powder.
The step that matters
Drying the peppers over the fire. Peppers that are not fully dry retain moisture, which makes them hard to grind to a fine powder and encourages spoilage. Drying until brittle is what makes the fine grind and storage possible.
“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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