How to Roast and Peel Peppers
How to Roast and Peel Peppers
I recently found Hatch chili peppers for sale at our grocery store. Yay! My husband and I spent our anniversary in March of 2016 in New Mexico and we were blown away by all the chili sauces. You know, green or red? No matter what you order there, each restaurant has their own red or green hatch chili sauce to go with it. We came back wanting more but here in the PNW there are rarely any Hatch chilies to be found. I was so excited! I finally had the opportunity to work with these magic chilies myself.
This is the technique for prepping peppers for use in many recipes and it can be applied to any pepper that you would like to serve cooked and without it's somewhat waxy outer skin.
After washing and thoroughly drying the peppers I roast them under a broiler in the oven on the highest setting until the outer skins are deeply charred turning them over halfway through. This took about 5 minutes per side and made the house smell wonderful!
After broiling the heck out of them, I popped them into a large plastic freezer bag for 15 minutes.
The steam off of the peppers fills up the bag slightly and the peppers steam for a while and the skins become loose.
After steaming the peppers are very soft and the waxy outer skins are almost falling off. I slit them open and scrape off the seeds and then turn the pepper over to lift the peel off of the flesh of the pepper. The peeled peppers are folded up to the right hand side of the photo.
Essentially these are the same as those canned chilies you've probably been buying in the tiny cans in the Hispanic food section of your grocery store but the taste is incomparable! These hatch chili's have so much flavor and they are spicy. This batch of 8 peppers made about 1 cup of cooked chilies. I used it all at one time but you can freeze these roasted and peeled peppers no matter what variety you use.
This is the same method I use to make the roasted red peppers that are popular jarred grocery store items. Made from fresh, any pepper you roast and peel yourself will be superior and I like knowing I haven't added any preservatives to mine.
Aren't these beautiful. Just imagine one of these beauties on your next green chili burger!
As I said before, this technique works for all chilies and bell peppers and it's really easy to do so go out and buy some peppers and try it yourself.
~Melisa
