Welcome to Harvest Monday, where we celebrate all things harvest related. It’s truly pepper time here in my neck of the woods. I must have picked almost a peck of sweet peppers on Saturday morning. I naively went down to the garden with only a gallon bucket, which I quickly filled. For my next trip I took two buckets and a Tubtrug! In the group photo below we have Orange Blaze, Carmen, Cornito Giallo, Cornito Rosso, Sweetie Pie and Dolce di Minervino peppers along with Dancer, Galine, Nubia and Nadia eggplants. Topping it all off is a big tromboncino squash.
sweet peppers, eggplant and tromboncino
Sweetie Pie is listed as a mini bell pepper, but some of mine are as big as full sized bell peppers I have grown in the past! My one plant has been super productive, and I decided to dehydrate this batch since I had so many other peppers coming in. I dried the Orange Blaze peppers too. Both of these are AAS Winners, and are doing great in the garden this year.
Sweetie Pie pepper
dehydrating Sweetie Pie peppers
But wait – I also got about a gallon of paprika type peppers Saturday morning. It’s Hungarian Magyar, Nora and Szegedi in the below photo. I’m smoking most of these today, but saved the round Nora peppers for dehydrating as-is and turning into a single varietal paprika powder.
paprika peppers
I got a couple of newcomers from the bean patch. It’s Turkey Craw on the left and Doyce Chambers Greasy Cut-Shorts on the right in the below photo. The Turkey Craw beans are on the Slow Food USA Ark of Taste, and they were indeed tasty when I cooked them up. These beans can be used as a snap bean, for fresh shelling and as a dried bean. Other Slow Food veggies I’m growing this year include the I’itoi onion, Lorz Italian garlic, Yellow Cabbage collard greens and Jimmy Nardello peppers.
Turkey Craw and Doyce Chambers Greasy Cut-Short beans
I also got more of the Korean hot peppers last week, including Gochugaru and Kimchi in the below photo. These container grown plants have done quite well for me this year.
Gochugaru and Kimchi peppers
And I got more of the Lady Choi hot peppers. I dehydrated all these and ground them up into gochugaru powder to use in making kimchi. The Gochugaru and Kimchi varieties are probably my favorites so far. Lady Choi has a good color and flavor, but is a tad too hot for my tastes. That means I can use less of it when making kimchi. More is better, because the peppers not only add heat but flavor and color too.
Lady Choi hot peppers
gochugaru made from Lady Choi peppers
I don’t like to grind up the seeds when I make chile powder, paprika or gochugaru. I have found it’s easier to remove the seeds and membranes from the peppers before drying, a task I do wearing gloves when working with hot peppers. I’ve also saved seeds from the Gochugaru and Kimchi peppers since they are not widely available and I hope to include them in a seed giveaway later this year as well as grow them myself next year.
dehydrating peppers for gochugaru
Earlier in the week my wife and I did a taste test on Jimmy Nardello and Manganji peppers. I cut them in half and grilled them before the tasting. My wife and I agreed that Manganji was tasty, but Jimmy Nardello had a bit more flavor and was a tad sweeter. I’ve been growing Jimmy Nardello for years, and it’s one of my favorite sweet peppers. Next year I want to try Melrose, another sweet pepper brought to America by Italian immigrants. It’s doing well for Phuong (Kentucky Fried Garden), so I want to see what we think of it here.
Jimmy Nardello and Manganji peppers
I got another nice harvest of Kaleidoscope peppers last week. I pickled the last batch of these mildly hot peppers, and this time I decided to try dehydrating them. I have no idea how much heat they will have when dried, but they might make a good chile powder. I have so many of them coming on I need to find some new ways to use them. I may try smoking some of them too, for a smoked chile powder.
Kaleidoscope peppers
And lastly I baked another loaf of sourdough bread last week. I was trying to score the loaf to make Stegosaurus Bread, but it didn’t turn out quite like I hoped. Fortunately it tasted fine, and if I try this one again I will snip the dough deeper with the scissors. Most of this loaf will likely wind up in the freezer, though I did use a bit of it to make tuna melt sandwiches one day for lunch. With the sourdough bread for a base, it held up well with the moist tuna topping.
sort of Stegosaurus loaf
Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest of any size or shape you want to share, add your name and blog link to Mr Linky below. There are no rules or regulations, and wonky veggies are always as welcome as the prize winners. And please be sure and check out what everyone is harvesting, or wishing they were harvesting!
A very colourful harvest of types of fruits we tend not to be able to grow so easily. I grew some chillies once that were supposed to mild. Stupidly the term mild lead me to think I was OK to prepare them without gloves, I was mistaken. My worry is if it does that to your hands what does i do to insides when you eat them?
Wow, this is shaping up to be a great pepper year for you! The paprika looks really rich. Your bread looks to me to be more a “Lobster Tail Loaf,” but I bet it’s delicious.
Lobster tail – I didn’t see that one! I was thinking something more reptilian. I bet lobster salad would be good on it too.
You got a gorgeous crust on that loaf of sour dough, and you’re getting tons of peppers and eggplants. That’s the great thing about peppers, when most of the garden starts slowing down in the fall, that’s when they really come into their own.
I noticed with it being so hot and dry this year, the peppers are getting surface cracks. Jalapenos seem more prone to this but I’m seeing it on the Ajarvaski peppers as well.
Yes, the peppers seem to come on all at once. And now I’ve got lots of them! I haven’t noticed cracking on the peppers here thankfully.
You are the king of chilli peppers! I am growing some aji limon peppers after reading about the aji chillis in this group that write about their harvests so thank you.
Lemme’s Italian is one you must try too…..Smaller plants that produce sweet frying peppers like crazy! Somewhere in my notes I thought Manganji was generally used green and I used mine that way last year.
I love paprika peppers and yours are gorgeous. This year I am drying Kalosca Hungarian. Have you grown Piment d’Esplette ? Color and flavor are amazing…wondering why I took a break from growing it.
Jeanne
I’ll have to try the Manganji green. We usually eat peppers ripe with a few exceptions like Shishito. And I’ll put Lemme’s Italian on my grow list for next year too.
The first photograph is wonderful and shows off your harvest wonderfully. I admire anyone who can make sourdough bread from scratch, it looks good. Imagine smothering it with a good homegrown tomato!
I just love how the peppers shine this time of year! I have quite a few of your Aji Golden pepper plants that are producing like crazy right now. Hard to believe that we are into September already. Thanks for all your updates. You encourage me to try different varieties and it’s always fun to see the subtle differences in plants. Happy (almost) Fall!
That is a wonderful assortment of peppers. One of my favorite pepper preparations that I came up with last year was fermented sweet pepper paste. I lacto-fermented various sweet peppers for about a week to ten days and then pureed the peppers and then dehydrated the puree down to a thick paste. It has a wonderful complex sweet flavor. The paste keeps extremely well in the freezer and doesn’t freeze rock hard to it is possible to scrape spoonfuls out of the jar whenever you want to use it. I wrote a post about my pepper fermentation experiments last December if you are interested in reading about them.
Thanks for reminding me about that! I was thinking this week I needed to check out what you did with sweet peppers. I will definitely give that a try.