Hot stuff

I was given a big bagful of hot green and orange chillies last week, and the excess quantity got me thinking: how best to preserve them?

I turned to the interweb for help and found a surprising number of sites dedicated entirely to the love of chillies (personal favourite: www.chillies-down-under.com). The options for dealing with surplus peppers seemed endless: pickling, preserving in brine or oil, air drying, freezing, turning them into various sauces, chutneys and preserves… 
In the end I decided to try a simple chutney recipe. It was my first go at pickling and most recipes recommended using pickling vinegar to avoid discolouration.

Once the chillies were deseeded, chopped, washed and ready (there were about 15-20 of them), they went into my biggest pan along with three chopped onions, seven tablespoons of dark brown sugar, a teaspoon of garam masala, and a litre of water. With the lid on, I boiled them for about 30 minutes, then chucked in 200ml of pickling vinegar, and simmered with the lid off for another 30 minutes until the mixture had reduced by about two thirds.

The end result was a seriously fragrant front room – it still smells of gherkins, as do I – and a large bottle of hot, spicy, sweet chilli chutney. Sterilising the bottle was the most annoying part of the process (boiling and baking it, while trying not to burn yourself, is no easy task) but there’s something quite satisfying about having made something edible on my first go. Women’s Institute, here I come.