How to Preserve Chillies: Freezing, Drying and Fermenting a Glut

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The three best ways to preserve chillies are freezing, drying and fermenting. Freezing is the quickest. Drying saves the most space and lasts the longest. Fermenting is my favourite because it gives you the best flavour and lets you make sauce whenever you like through the year.

Harvest time gets busy. One of my Kashmiri Mirch plants has already given me two kilos of chillies, and I am expecting at least another two or three kilos from that same plant. Multiply that across a polytunnel and you need a plan.

In this guide I’ll go through how I preserve chillies when I’ve got more than I can use fresh: how I freeze, dry, ferment and pickle them, how I pick small chillies quickly, and how I keep a few pods back for next year’s seeds.

Pick at the Right Time Before You Preserve

For sauce and cooking I pick firm, fully coloured pods. The heat is mostly set by the time a chilli starts turning, but the sugars, sweetness and flavour keep developing until it’s fully ripe. Once a pod goes past that point it starts losing moisture and the flavour starts to change. Overripe chillies dry out and aren’t as juicy and meaty, so you’re wasting a chunk of your harvest. There is also the potential for pathogens to develop, which is more of a concern for fermenting than for drying or freezing.

I’ve written a full guide on when to pick chillies, including how to tell when chillies that don’t ripen red are ready.

How to Pick Small Chillies Quickly

Picking small chillies like piri piri or Tabasco takes ages. I picked my CC Piri Piri plants recently and got about one and a half to two kilos from each plant. That took me roughly an hour per plant.

You can go faster by stripping the pods off, stalks and all. The trouble is you then spend an extra hour or more trimming stalks when you make sauce, and you don’t want stalks in your chilli sauce. So I take a bit more time when I pick and leave the calyx (the green cap) on the plant.

Here’s how I do it.

1. Look at the way the ripe pod is curving as it grows.
2. Pull the pod back on itself, in the opposite direction to that curve.
3. A fully ripe pod pops straight off the calyx. If it’s still green or not quite ripe, it won’t. It pulls off at the base instead, or takes more effort, which tells you to leave it.
4. Carry on along the plant. Once you get the hang of it, it’s quick.

The calyx stays on the plant, so all your chillies need is a wash before they go into a sauce or the freezer.

Planning for a Big Harvest

If you want enough chillies to make a big batch of fermented sauce, you want as many as possible to ripen around the same time. That means planning at sowing time, because different species take very different amounts of time.

Capsicum annuum (jalapeños, cayennes) and Capsicum frutescens (piri piri, Tabasco) are normally shorter season plants. Some will fruit in as little as 60 days, but most take around 90. Capsicum chinense, which covers most of the hots and superhots like the Naga Morich, takes about 120 days and sometimes longer. It depends on the variety, so check before you sow.

If you just want to freeze chillies and use them through the year, timing doesn’t matter at all. Pick them as they ripen, remove any green stems and keep adding to the freezer.

How to Freeze Chillies

Freezing is the easiest way to preserve chillies.

Prepare them exactly as if you’re going to take them straight out of the freezer and use them. Wash them, make sure they’re clean, and remove the calyx, any leaves and any other bits of debris. Then put them in a zip lock bag and into the freezer. They’ll keep for many months.

TOP TIP

Blend up your chillies before freezing and lay the mash flat in a ziplock bag. This makes it easy to break chunks off to us in meals. And a tip one of my Patreons gave me, freeze the mash in ice trays. I would take this a step further: once the mash is frozen in ice blocks, stick them in a ziplock bag or vacuum seal them.

Frozen chillies won’t be firm and crunchy once they thaw, so use them where that doesn’t matter. Blend them straight into a dish like chilli con carne.

If you’re making a fermented hot sauce, always start with fresh chillies. Freezing kills off much of the lactobacillus that lives on the skins, and that’s what does the fermenting. Frozen chillies are fine for bulking out a ferment once you’ve got plenty of fresh ones in there, but don’t rely on them on their own.

How to Dry Chillies

Drying is the best option if you want to save a lot of space, and dried chillies last much longer than frozen ones. Kept well, they’ll last you years.

You can dry chillies at a high heat, but I wouldn’t. Drying slower and longer at a lower temperature (below 50℃) keeps a better colour and flavour. Think of sun dried tomatoes compared with ones rushed in a very hot dehydrator. Have a bit of patience and you’ll get a much better result.

Drying also holds on to colour better than fermenting. When I dried some Aji Lemon Drops, they took about five days and kept their bright yellow beautifully. The ones I fermented from the same batch came out a duller mustard colour, which is just what fermentation does.

Dried chillies are great for flakes and spice rubs. I ground some of those dried Aji Lemon Drops with a little salt and pepper and spread it on a pork chop, and it was lovely. I also have an Aji Peach Fantasy recipe.

How to Ferment Chillies

Fermenting is possibly my favourite way to preserve chillies, for a few reasons.

• It improves the flavour. Fermenting takes away a lot of the green flavour many chillies have. Jalapeños and cayennes taste great fresh and great fermented, but it’s the Capsicum chinense hots and superhots where it really shines. They’ve got loads of heat but don’t always have the best flavour raw, and fermenting lifts them massively. Check out my ferment playlist on YouTube.
• It keeps for years. A fermented chilli mash will keep for quite a few years, so you can make sauce even when you’ve got no fresh chillies.
• You can make sauce as you need it. If you sell sauces, you don’t want to bottle a thousand at once and leave them sitting on a shelf. Keep a big batch of mash and use it as the base, making up the number of bottles you need at the time. If you’re thinking of selling sauces but have questions then my one-to-one consultancy might be of interest.
• It isn’t just for hot sauce. Use fermented mash in cooking like you would frozen or dried chillies. It’s even good for spicing up a Bloody Mary. We have bags of fermented mash in the freezer so that we can add it to various recipes.

There are two ways I ferment chillies.

Fermenting Chillies in a Jar With Brine

This is the method I’d suggest if you’re new to fermenting. It’s worth watching my video on Clean, Sterilise and Sanitise first to make sure your fermentations are safe.

1. Keep everything clean. Wash your hands and clean the jar thoroughly, ideally on a hot dishwasher cycle.
2. Rinse the chillies in cold water. Not hot. The lactobacillus bacteria you want are already on the chillies, and hot water can kill them. Freezing kills them too or makes them go dormant, so if you add any frozen chillies, use them to bulk out a ferment based on fresh ones.
3. Chop and pack. Chop the chillies and pack them into the jar as tightly as you can. I like the jar at least three quarters full. Wear gloves if you can.
4. Make the brine. Cover the chillies with water, weighing it as you go, and add salt at 2 to 3% of the weight of the water. For 500g of water, 2% is 10g of salt. I always go a little over 2%, so I’d use about 12g, because the salt doesn’t always mix in evenly and you don’t want any part of it under 2%. Use pure salt with nothing added, like pickling salt, kosher salt or pure sea salt.
5. Fit an airlock. Fermentation produces CO2, and an airlock lets it bubble out without letting dirty air back in. You can buy a lid with an airlock or drill a hole in a jar lid and fit a rubber grommet. Leave a gap at the top so the brine doesn’t touch the bottom of the airlock.
6. Keep it at a steady temperature. Around 20°C is ideal. You’ll have fermented chillies in about two weeks.

While it ferments, you should see the brine go cloudy at the bottom and lots of small bubbles. Both are good signs. Ideally the chillies stay under the brine. Some people weigh them down, but I give the jar a gentle swirl every other day to coat the floating pieces in brine. Once the fermentation gets going, the CO2 it produces helps keep the bad bacteria out.

When it’s ready, it should smell fresh, a bit like pickled peppers. If it smells bad or you see anything growing on top, don’t use it. Another useful resource is my “Is My Fermentation Healthy?” video.

Vacuum Bag Fermenting

Vacuum sealing removes all the oxygen, which is ideal for lactobacillus. The bacteria you don’t want need oxygen to survive.

1. Weigh your chillies and add 2% salt. For 400g of chillies, that’s 8g of salt. You use less salt with this method than you would in a jar.
2. Chop roughly and seal. Put the chillies and salt in a bag and vacuum seal it. If your sealer has a moist setting, use it.
3. Let the gas out when it inflates. The bag will puff up with CO2 as it ferments. Snip a corner, let the gas out as gently as you can without letting air back in, then seal it straight away. Don’t vacuum it again, just seal it.

Because you use less salt, you’ll probably want to add a bit more when you turn the mash into sauce. Taste it first.

Keeping Your Fermented Sauce Safe

Once you blend your fermented chillies into a sauce, you want the resulting pH below 4.0. A cheap pH meter is worth having. Calibrate it and clean it every time you use it.

Lactobacillus usually stops fermenting at around pH 3.3 to 3.4. Vinegar is very acidic, so adding it brings the pH down further.

Be careful if you thin a sauce with water. Tap water is around pH 7, so it raises the pH of your sauce. If you want to thin it without making it too vinegary, a pinch of citric acid will bring the pH back down without adding a citrus flavour.

If you add sugar to a fermented sauce, heat it to around 60 to 70°C to stop the fermentation. Otherwise the lactobacillus will eat the sugar and start fermenting again.

Some people also freeze dry their chillies. I haven’t tried it yet, so if you do, let me know how you get on.

Pickling Chillies

Pickling is another good way to preserve chillies, especially fleshy, sweeter ones. My Malawi Piquanté peppers (also known as the Peppadew) are perfect for it. Here’s my pickled pepper recipe if you want to give it a go.

Saving Seeds From Your Harvest

A big harvest is a good chance to keep seeds back for next season. I go through how to choose seed pods in my when to pick chillies guide, but here are the basics.

Firm, perfectly ripe pods will usually give you viable seeds, but you’ll have a much better chance of germination if you use pods that have gone a little overripe and soft. You can even let them dry on the plant.

Just don’t leave them too long. Once it gets colder, pods left on the plant can go mouldy and start to rot. Some seeds from a rotten pod might still grow, but it’s not worth the risk.

Keep Track of Your Varieties

When you’re growing lots of different chillies, it’s easy to lose track of which plant is which. I use my SeedsIO plant and seed tracker to keep a record of my plants, their labels, where they came from and what they’ve produced. It saves a lot of confusion when you’re saving seeds and working on recipes. Its free to use, so sign up today!

Common Mistakes When Preserving Chillies

• Picking too early for sauce. You miss the extra flavour that comes once the pods have fully coloured.
• Leaving pods on too long. As the weather cools, pods left on the plant can go mouldy and the seeds will be no good.
• Picking small chillies with the stalks on. Use the calyx pop method and save yourself the trimming later.
• Drying too hot. It costs you colour and flavour, and above 40°C it can stop seeds germinating.
• Thinning fermented sauce with water without checking the pH. Test it and bring it back below 4.0 with vinegar or a little citric acid.

Try a couple of these and see what suits your kitchen and the sauces you like to make. Let me know how you get on and which way you prefer to preserve your chillies.

Preserving Chillies FAQs