Chilli Farm

The chilli farm is a source of peppers. This year the biggest plant yielded over a kilogram of peppers. There are lots of different varieties, with lots of flavours and spice levels.

Ohnivec peppers are big and long and decently spicy with a sweet and fruity flavour. It is perfect for a mild smoked chilli sauce. The plant is excessively productive, to the point where it sacrifices all its growth for pepper production. This is a problem because it eventually gets swamped by its leafier neighbours.

Bolivian rainbow peppers are very colourful and spicy. They ripen from purple to yellow to orange to red, giving a wonderful display of colour. A pain to harvest though, cause there's so many tiny peppers.

Magic Mick habanero is like an orange habanero but for some reason its really easy to grow. Its like the cheat code of habaneros. one plant really thrived in the greenhouse this year and you can see that its yield exceeded poppy. The flavour is like oranges and very spicy, but the orange flavour goes away when cooked. perfect for a raw tropical mango habanero sauce.

Ohnivec, Joe's long cayenne, Habanero, Naga, Lemon Dream and a spiky cucumber are battling for light in the undergrowth of the greenhouse

Dorset Naga is one of the worlds hottest peppers! It is slow growing at first but eventually it can grow to a giant size and produce thousands of peppers per plant. unfortunately, the greenhouse is small so its size here is limited, but still producing over a kilogram of peppers per plant I cant really complain. Now the only question is what to do with bucketfulls of almost inedible peppers!

fermented smoked ohnivec sauce (red), fresh naga tomatillo sauce (green), tropical mango habanero sauce (yellow)

The nicest and freshest peppers are turned straight into sauce. Easy vinegar sauce will store well in the fridge as long as there is more than 20% vinegar by volume. Fermented sauce can also be made, which is 2.5% salt by weight. The salt creates an environment where lactobacillus bacteria thrives and feasts on the peppers, creating lactic acid which preserves them and gives the sauce a delicious tangy flavour.

Excess peppers are dried in a dehydrator to make powder. Usually I like to take out the seeds to make a more flavourful powder, but here I obviously haven't bothered.