This post may contain affiliate links. Canning peppers is canning apples of the best ways to preserve peppers.
They’re cooked and ready for last-minute weeknight meals from the pantry, and they’re also perfect on sandwiches and salads right out of the jar. Fire roasting really enhances their flavor, but that step is optional, and it’s perfectly fine to can plain peppers in a pressure canner. I absolutely love crunching on fresh peppers in season, and I’ll bite into sweet red bell peppers right out in the garden, crunching them like fresh apples. The problem is, the season is short. Peppers, whether hot or sweet, have a short growing season, especially here in Vermont.
While they only thrive during the heat of summer, they’re perfect for adding color, flavor, and in the case of hot peppers, spice to meals year-round. I’ve tried dehydrating peppers in my Excaliber Dehydrator, and that works wonderfully for soups, stew, and chili. It’s honestly one of my favorite dehydrator recipes, and they’re quick and delicious. That said, dried peppers don’t work so well for salads, sandwiches, stir-fries, and breakfast potato and egg dishes.
Dehydrating has its place, but that technique is not nearly as versatile as canning peppers. Fire-roasted peppers are perfect for canning, and while roasting is optional from a canning safety perspective, it really enhances their flavor. Pepper skins also tend to get tough during the canning process, and blistering them over a fire beforehand prevents this, resulting in a higher quality finished product. That’s especially true of hot peppers, which have tougher skins.
We order in a case or two of hatch green chilis right from New Mexico, and the fire roasting makes all the difference when canning hatch chilis or any other hot pepper. For sweet peppers, the fire roasting is more about enhancing flavor, since they tend to have tender skins that hold up better to canning. Pickled peppers, which can be canned using a water bath canner, also work on my favorite sandwich, but just plain canned peppers are a lot better in my opinion. Canning plain peppers require a pressure canner, since there’s no added acidity from the pickling brine.
If you’re not familiar with pressure canning, I’d highly recommend reading my beginner’s guide to pressure canning before getting started. Pepper Canning Yield How many peppers do you need for a canner batch? That depends, to some extent, on the type and size of your peppers and how you pack them. Packing whole peppers, as I often do with bell peppers, is the least efficient method space-wise but the most versatile. After roasting, the peppers are cored and seeded, then flattened.
Diced peppers pack into jars much more efficiently, and you’ll need considerably more per pint. Hot peppers also tend to lose more volume in roasting and cleaning, as there are more seeds and skins per pound than with larger bell peppers. 2 pounds of fresh peppers for each pint of finished yield. That means a 25 lb case of hot peppers makes about 10 to 12 pints, roughly. Pressure Canning Peppers Canning peppers starts with washing the peppers. Buy organic if you can, or opt for growing your own organically instead.
After washing, I fire roast them on my backyard grill. There are other methods, but this is by far the most efficient. You can do a dozen bell peppers at a time on an average-sized gas grill, and many dozen smaller hot peppers. In a pinch, you can roast them over a stovetop burner one at a time too, with tongs to hold each pepper. I’ve also used our high output propane burner outdoors, the one we use for making homemade beer, and that will blister a pepper in seconds. The same goes for the 3-burner high output propane stove I use in my outdoor canning kitchen.
As I’ve said, blistering the skin is optional, but it really does enhance the flavor when canning peppers. It adds a subtle smokiness to the whole pepper and also carmelizes some of the natural sugars in the pepper which really brings out their flavor. If you skip roasting the peppers, you’ll need to parboil them anyway so they’re partially cooked when they go into the canning jars. This is important for a number of reasons. First, the peppers must be softened if they’re going to be packed whole as I’m doing with these bell peppers. Even if you’re going to dice them though, they do need to be partially cooked before going into the canning jars.