Advice for drying chillies needed

[KennethT]

I've been growing my own chillies for a little while now and my plants make a lot more than I can use at one time.  Indonesian food uses almost exclusively fresh chillies - so using my home grown chillies out of the freezer works really well.  Malaysian food, however, uses, in large part, dried chillies.  Many times, they are similar chillies, but dried rather than fresh which changes the flavor profile as well makes the color darker and more intense.

 

Traditionally, the freshly harvested chillies (left on the plant to get super ripe before harvest) are spread out on tarps in the hot tropical sun and raked around every once in a while and left there until dry - usually a couple of days.  I live in an apartment in NYC with no access to either tropical heat or sun.

 

Can I just lay the chillies on my countertop or somewhere out of the way (but gets decent airflow) to dry them?  I really don't want to have to get a dehydrator - I neither have the space for it, nor would I really use it for anything else.

 

Thanks!

[ElsieD]

This may or may not help.  We had some fresh shishito peppers pop up in our garden this year and John brought them home.  Some were left on the counter for days where they shriveled and dried up.  Whether they dried enough for long term storage I can't say, but they had zero mold.  You could try drying them in a very low oven with the door ajar to let the moisture escape.  Other things can be dried this way so I don't know why it wouldn't work for chilies.

[weinoo]

37 minutes ago, KennethT said:

I live in an apartment in NYC with no access to either tropical heat or sun.

have you tried over a subway grate?

[KennethT]

40 minutes ago, weinoo said:

have you tried over a subway grate?

That has a little more "pee aroma" than I'm going for....

[KennethT]

1 hour ago, ElsieD said:

This may or may not help.  We had some fresh shishito peppers pop up in our garden this year and John brought them home.  Some were left on the counter for days where they shriveled and dried up.  Whether they dried enough for long term storage I can't say, but they had zero mold.  You could try drying them in a very low oven with the door ajar to let the moisture escape.  Other things can be dried this way so I don't know why it wouldn't work for chilies.

Hmmm... so basically a hack dehydrator.. smart.  My only oven is my CSO - I could set the Keep Warm to like 100 degrees or something but I don't know how long I can let it go for... I assume it would take more than a couple hours.

 

On another note, I actually just found a few chillies that fell off the plant and were languishing on my floor... they were nicely dehydrated - still flexible but definitely dried and certainly no mold.  So I guess that's always an option!  Can you extrapolate the 10 second rule to the 2 week rule?

[ElsieD]

I have a dehydrator and the booklet that came with it it says to dehydrate small peppers, use a temperature of 125F to 130F to get them to the brittle stage. They say it takes 10 to 15 hours.  I don't see why you couldn't use the CSO to do this once the oven registers this temperature with the door slightly ajar.  Piercing a small hole in the pepper prior to dehydrating will help speed things along.

[blue_dolphin]

I’d suggest putting the chiles on some sort of screen to improve circulation.  This 11-inch aluminum pizza screen (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) fits conveniently in the CSO and I use it often in lieu of an air fryer.  They come in all sizes though.
In my CSO, the lowest plate warmer setting is 125°F but mine fluctuates from 115-130. It will run with the door slight ajar but probably not long enough to really dehydrate them. 

I’ve had little Thai chilies dehydrate themselves nicely on my counter! 

 

[weinoo]

What kind of radiators do you have, or when they renovated did they provide forced air?

 

You know how dry it is in our apartments this time of year - I've already got the humidifiers out, so I imagine just leaving them near any heat source with good air circulation would do the trick.

[KennethT]

26 minutes ago, weinoo said:

What kind of radiators do you have, or when they renovated did they provide forced air?

 

You know how dry it is in our apartments this time of year - I've already got the humidifiers out, so I imagine just leaving them near any heat source with good air circulation would do the trick.

No radiators - since it was converted to apartments, the building used fan coils - including a gigantic water chiller on the roof for the A/C (which was nice because we didn't have to pay for the electricity to run it - it was part of the maintenance).  They recently converted to a heat pump type HVAC system with a compressor in each unit so we can just about use the A/C whenever we want, but now we pay for the electricity it uses.

 

According to my humistat, it's currently 44% humidity in here which is pretty nice.  It will drop a lot more once it gets to be winter.

[KennethT]

1 hour ago, blue_dolphin said:

I’d suggest putting the chiles on some sort of screen to improve circulation.  This 11-inch aluminum pizza screen (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) fits conveniently in the CSO and I use it often in lieu of an air fryer.  They come in all sizes though.
In my CSO, the lowest plate warmer setting is 125°F but mine fluctuates from 115-130. It will run with the door slight ajar but probably not long enough to really dehydrate them. 

I’ve had little Thai chilies dehydrate themselves nicely on my counter! 

 

I upgraded to the new CSO-500 (thanks to one of our Canadian friends!) which actually has a built-in air fryer mode and comes with a screen/drip tray - it works quite well.  The lowest keep warm setting is still 125F but I haven't checked it's accuracy.  I also don't know if the fan turns on in keep warm mode.

 

I'm also wondering if there will be a flavor difference between the slow dried method and the accelerated oven method.

 

These chillies are pretty skinny, so I may just keep them on the counter to do it.  I was just curious if people had done it any other way so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. 

[KennethT]

Dehydrated using the "apartment floor" method.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

It's been a few decades since I grew peppers, but I would take a needle and thread and make a garland (for lack of a better term) which I could then hang up to dry.

 

[weinoo]

29 minutes ago, KennethT said:

No radiators - since it was converted to apartments, the building used fan coils - including a gigantic water chiller on the roof for the A/C (which was nice because we didn't have to pay for the electricity to run it - it was part of the maintenance).  They recently converted to a heat pump type HVAC system with a compressor in each unit so we can just about use the A/C whenever we want, but now we pay for the electricity it uses.

 

According to my humistat, it's currently 44% humidity in here which is pretty nice.  It will drop a lot more once it gets to be winter.

 

Wow, down below 30% here already, but the (dry) heat's been on constantly since the temps outside dropped below 60℉.

[rotuts]

@KennethT

 

I think you have found an effective , cheap , local method.

 

string them up !