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If you like chilies and you’ve managed to grow a lot of them, you can successfully preserve them to use the whole year round. People had food preservation problems all the time, so now we have a lot of various solutions for it. Some of the solutions are quite old and others are modern ways of preserving food.

Before starting preserving your chilies, you should know some basics that will help you get the most out of your garden. You should know that the best approach to harvest your produce is the staggered harvest. It means that you harvest your chilies several times during the season. This way you ensure the maximum amount of produce from your plants. If you leave the chilies on, the plant will produce less new fruit. If you use staggered harvesting, plant will keep growing new chilies throughout the season. It is better to harvest ripe fruit with shiny skins and that are firm. You will see that the fruits that are ripe come off the plant easily. Then you should wash and inspect the fruits one more time to get rid of any chilies that have black spots.

Now, you can choose the way to preserve chilies. The traditional way to preserve chilies is air drying. You can make a string of chilies, which is known as ristra. It is the best known method of air drying your chilies. But you should make sure before air drying that you are not using other varieties of peppers like Jalapenos, Roccotos or others that are have thicker flesh.

You can dry your chilies using the traditional Mexican method. Wrap some string around three chili stems twice. Then bring it between two of the chilies and make a granny knot or half-hitch. And then, using the same piece of string, keep tying up chilies in the groups of three till it gets too much to handle. When you are done with one ristra, you can start doing another one.

You can also use faster but less traditional way of drying chilies. You can use a large needle with string and push the needle through the stem and push chilies tightly against each other. It is a good way to handle smaller chilies that take more time to handle in a traditional way. Then you can hang your chili ristras somewhere outside. Inspect them from time to time, removing some chilies that begin to rot. Hanging chilies outside has a lot of benefits. They get dry faster and better this way. If some of the chilies begin to rot, they tend to drip a sticky liquid that can stain anything inside. And rotting chilies attract a lot of fruit flies that is why you don’t want to dry your chilies inside. So, now whenever you need a chili, you can simply snap it off at the stem when it is dried and use it for your cooking purposes.

Have you heard that food storage can save you from lots of troubles during all sorts of emergency cases. Read more about food storage on this food storage website.

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