The appropriate storage temperature for peppers is 45-50°F, which is warmer than your home refrigerator should be. Peppers may get chill injury if stored for prolonged periods of time in temperatures less than 45-50°F. Thus, it’s better to store them at room temperature. If they start to get a little soft, they are still good and should be used soon. They may also turn red in color, which is simply a sign that they are continuing to ripen. Store peppers in a paper bag and avoid extra moisture that can cause spoiling.
Poblano Peppers: Poblano peppers are a standout pepper when it comes to hot peppers for one simple reason—Flavor! Some peppers are just hot, and then there are a few that balance their heat with flavor making the whole eating experience more enjoyable. Poblano peppers are dark green with wide shoulders and a pointy bottom. They have a thinner wall than bell peppers, but thick enough that they hold up to roasting very well. In fact, roasting is the process that amplifies and develops the flavor of a poblano. As I mentioned, poblanos are a hot pepper with a mild to medium level of heat.
Korean Peppers: Korean peppers are small, skinny, long bright red hot peppers
The heat of a hot pepper is mostly contained in the white pith and seed cavity within the pepper. If you don’t have a tolerance for the heat, you can remove this portion of the pepper and significantly reduce the heat of the pepper. Two more words of caution when handling and cooking with hot peppers. First, adjust the amount of hot peppers in the dish you are making to your liking. Remember, you can always add a little more but you can’t take the heat away. Second, when handling hot peppers it is advisable to wear plastic gloves and/or be aware of where you put your hands for awhile after you cut the pepper—as in don’t rub your eyes!
The last hot pepper you’ll get in your box is the familiar jalapeño. Save these up and make jalapeño poppers, or just eat them as a condiment to meals. Jalapeños are great as pickles as well—which is a great way to preserve them so you can eat them all winter long!
The Korean pepper is a hot pepper, with the heat level similar to a serrano pepper. You can use this pepper anywhere you might need a fresh hot chile and I have been using it in recipes that call for jalapenos as well as fresh Thai chiles. They have added a nice background heat to fresh salsas, scrambled eggs, Thai curry dishes and fried rice. If you prefer less heat, just use a portion of the pepper or remove the seeds and white pith. As with all hot chile peppers, handle them carefully and don’t rub your eyes with your hands for awhile after handling them!
In Korea, this pepper is often used as a dried chile. This makes sense because it has a thinner wall which means it dries very easily. You could also use them to make a beautiful dried chile ristra. You can string up the fresh chiles and hang them in your kitchen to dry naturally. Once they are dried you can use them as a dried chile pepper including grinding them with a spice grinder to make hot chile flakes. If you aren’t into hot peppers, you could also enjoy your dried chile ristra just as a decoration in your kitchen or use it as a Christmas gift for someone who does like a spicy culinary adventure!
Growing Information: 2018 was our first year growing Korean peppers. The picture in the Osborne Seed catalog showed a long, dark purple pepper that looked to be pretty prolific. They described it as “a unique Asian pepper that is similar in pungency and appearance to a serrano. The fruit are purple in color and ripen to a deep dark red color. They are easy to harvest and uniform. Outstanding yield and good ripening ability in the Pacific Northwest make this a nice addition to a hot pepper program.” We thought it would be fun to try something new and we don’t have any purple peppers so why not give it a try! We have found that the plants are very prolific producers and just as the picture shows, they set on quite a lot of dark purple peppers. Our next mission was to decide when to harvest them. Since we’ve never experienced this pepper before we are basically doing our best to assess the qualities of the pepper at different stages and make our best judgements as to when it’s at its peak of ripeness. I started trialing this pepper when it was just purple and found that it really didn’t have much flavor. It tasted like a very green hot pepper. Nothing really remarkable about it. So we decided to let it ripen more and see what happened. Now that they are fully red, the flavor has really changed and it not only has heat, but a much more complex flavor than when it was green.
