This week the weather is fabulous. As a result, we are having to water the plants twice a day, because otherwise the pots are drying out and the plants are wilting. That said, the sun does have its advantages. It’s happily ripening off the chillies, and it’s also helping to dry them too.
Solar ovens are some of the oldest and simplest ways of cooking and drying food. You can get some rather expensive modern takes on the age-old technique, or you can do what I do… invert a pyrex dish over a zinc ledge (to reflect back the heat), then place your chillies on a wire rack inside. Within hours the gentle heat will help dehydrate the peppers, causing them to naturally be preserved. You can then crumble them into flakes or even add them to salt and dried herbs to make a rub or a delicious flavoured grinding salt.
The best thing about the technique is that I am able to dry peppers as and when they ripen off. In this heat, it takes about a day to dry out the chillies, and that’s also fantastic because I would normally do that in a dehydrator. This way I use no energy, other than the sun which is free and plentiful at the moment.
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