Marie WheelerSo what do I plan to do with these blazing beauties?
Why, I plan to make the most awesome Hot Pepper Jelly courtesy of the ever-awesome Ball Complete Book Of Home Preserving!
I didn’t grow Habanero peppers this year, but I used the Ball recipe for Habanero Gold Jelly. I have used this recipe in the past and love it, so why not try it out again with a sub of Thai Chiles? I’ll call it Thai Gold instead!
Since I’m not fond of copyright infringement, I will choose to not copy the recipe from the book, but will share the link to Food.com who apparently has no such qualms! They mix up the hot pepper section too, but the amounts of each ingredient are the same.
- Fresh Thai Chiles or blazin’ Hot Pepper of Choice, fine dice
- Red or Orange Bell Pepper, fine dice
- Red Onion, fine dice
- White Vinegar
- Dried Apricots, fine dice
- Sugar
- Sure Jell Liquid Pectin
- 3-4 half pint jars or 7-8 quarter pint jars, prepped and ready for fillin’ with the lids ready to go too!
- Canning Funnel, optional
- Water Bath Canner, optional
This is a several step process, so you first take the apricots and do a nice fine dice on them. You add your diced apricots and vinegar to a deep stainless steel pot. This is important! You will think that you don’t need to have such a large pot, but you do. Why? In later steps you will see that jelly-making is akin to candy making in terms of the rolling boil. It creeps up the side of a pot and can get away from you if you are not careful.
Hot, sticky, burning sugar is not a good time.
So, you let your vinegar and apricot mixture sit in the pan for at least 4 hours, or if you get distracted doing something else, overnight. Seriously, this happens.
You then fine dice the bell pepper and onion and add to the pot with the sugar, stirring often, until it comes to that hard boil I was talking about:
You can see that I still have plenty of room, but please note that this could easily creep to the top. I had pulled it off the heat for a minute here so that I could safely take a picture and then add the pectin. 
Once you add the pectin, you bring it back up to this rolling boil for 1 minute. Remove from heat and skim and quickly skim any foam (which you can see in the picture I forgot to do!). Using either your grace or a canning funnel, pour the hot jelly into the jars, leaving about a 1/4″ head space. Wipe the rims and tighten the lids down.
Et voila!
As is my way, I don’t hot water can the jelly after tightening the lid, but it is always recommended!
So clearly I have some leftover peppers from that picture and I additionally had some jalapeno and long red chili peppers, so I strung them up with a needle and thread. Stay tuned for more adventures with spice…
