Dried chillies are super easy to come by in most Chinese supermarkets, but there is nothing more satisfying than getting to tell your friends that the dish you cooked had home made dried chillies in it, gives you that sense of "yeah, I'm that awesome" about it lol. These can also be blended in a food processor to make home made chilli flakes. The best think about this is that you can use any chilli pepper you want, don't like to much heat? then use Jalapeño pepper, like it hot, use Scotch bonnets, its totally up to you! You can use red or green chillies, but the red ones are always more visually striking, hence why they're used normally.
Useful equipment:
Small meat clever - https://amzn.to/3XQWZnV
Chopping board - https://amzn.to/3H5K7Eo
Grease proof paper - https://amzn.to/3OULhVf
Baking Tray - https://amzn.to/3UuyKsT
Swing lid jar - https://amzn.to/3inpyJd
Food Processor - https://amzn.to/3HoUJyz
Ingredients:
75g birds eye chilli peppers
Method:
Trim your chillies, you do this by cutting off all the green on the chilli pepper, some people just cut the stalks off, but that makes them a bit fibrous to me, so I like to take the all the green off.
Once trimmed, place on to a baking tray with ether greaseproof paper or baking parchments on.
Place into your oven and bake at the lowest setting.
Mine goes down to 75c, this took 5 hours for my birds eye chillies to fully dry out. shake the tray every 20-30 minutes to make sure the chillies surface area can dry out properly.
Once dried, take them out of the oven and let them cool.
They are then ready to be stored in air tight container and will last well over 3-4 months if stored correctly.
To make into chilli flakes, simply place them into a food processor.
Blitz the chillies until they are the size you like. These can then be stored like the whole chillies and will last just as long.
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