Three Mile Island Pepper

Last week we showed you how we dehydrated jalapeno peppers and then ground it into pepper that we use to flavor dishes.  I used a lot of it today on top of some purple hull peas & sausage over white rice.  It added some flavor depth - hot, but not swell up your tongue and watery-eyes hot.

Our son, Russ, saw what we had done and wanted us to try to dehydrate and grind into ground pepper some of his peppers.  He had a very productive habanero pepper plant or two this year.  He put up four gallon-sized zip loc bags of habaneros in his freezer.  This week he brought over two of the four bags for us to process.  He had already cut them into rings so they'd fit better in the freezer.

We poured them onto the trays of the dehydrator while they were frozen and then used a fork to spread them out evenly so they would dry in a uniform fashion.

Pretty soon we had every rack filled.  We would have to do this in two separate batches.  I was a little concerned about them being frozen, buy they dried just the same.

The habaneros shrunk up to half its size in no time as all the water was removed in the drying process, leaving just the heat.

While hot and dry, Tricia put them into the food processer and gave it a whirl or two.  Here's the part where we wanted to be really careful.  That red dust in the air would be really painful to get in your eyes.  It also would not be pleasant to breathe it in.

Here's what a habanero looks like whole.  It's candy-apple red and has a pointed tail.

Two gallon-sized ziploc bags of peppers yielded this much ground habanero pepper.  We have two more to process and then we'll be done.

I haven't worked up the boldness to try this yet.  I can handle jalapenos.  I just don't think I could do habaneros.  These things are just really hot.  Radioactive hot.  I think we'll label this container, "Three Mile Island Pepper."  It'll put hair on your chest, for sure.