New to canning:

[Ridgerunner]

This is an interesting thread, I am nterested in canning, my grandma has done jelly/jams, salsa, tomatoes and pickles before and they were great. I would eventually love to do Tomato sauce, salsa, and pickles....don't have much time for anything else and not a big enough garden yet lol.....but...

I do have a semi-related question....does anyone here have good experience with preserving your own herbs? I'm doing a great many herbs this coming year and I would love to know how to dry preserve them for later uses.

Here's a thread on drying herbs. You might post over here and get that one going again. I'm sure others will have more comments.

http://www.theeasygarden.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=32615

 

[r4eboxer]

This is an interesting thread, I am nterested in canning, my grandma has done jelly/jams, salsa, tomatoes and pickles before and they were great. I would eventually love to do Tomato sauce, salsa, and pickles....don't have much time for anything else and not a big enough garden yet lol.....but...

I do have a semi-related question....does anyone here have good experience with preserving your own herbs? I'm doing a great many herbs this coming year and I would love to know how to dry preserve them for later uses.

I dry my herbs, I do the paper bag method and the dehydrator method. I use both because I'm too lazy to pull them out of the dehydrator right away. Basil grows so fast and if the dehydrator is full I cut them, tie them and put them in a paper bag to dry. Also I grow quite a few varieties and my 10 tray dehydrator can't handle all I cut.

You will fall off your chair the first time you use your freshly dried herbs in your recipes. You will never be able to go back to the factory jarred type.

 

[ducks4you]

I dehydrated some of my herbs last year, first time--basil, thyme and oregano. Somehow I actually READ the instructions. They suggested cutting the stems and drying them that way. You can break off of the dried leaves from the stems and store afterwards, but the leaves are harder to handle after drying.
I also dried out jalepanos and ancho problanos. Instead of making them into leather, I dried them to point when you can take a table knife and crack them. DH loves to use them this way to make chili.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I dried some habeneros one year by hanging them up until they were bone dry, then ground them up in a food processor to get a pepper powder. You could dry them enough in a dehydrator to do that but you might want to split them so they dry faster.

That powder could be used as a seasoning but I intended it for another use. I mixed it with water and made a pepper rinse to put on certain landscaping plants (tulips. Here deer love tulips) to try to keep the deer from eating them, but that backfired. One of my dogs loved that habenero rinse so much she rolled on the plants and destroyed them.

 

[ducks4you]

I did just that--I de-seeded and split and dehydrated my ancho problanos, and dried them enough to crack them, then stored them in a tin with a plastic lid in my spice cabinet. DH really likes to use them for chili this way. I was smart enough to save the seeds, too.

 

[r4eboxer]

I dehydrated some of my herbs last year, first time--basil, thyme and oregano. Somehow I actually READ the instructions. They suggested cutting the stems and drying them that way. You can break off of the dried leaves from the stems and store afterwards, but the leaves are harder to handle after drying.
I also dried out jalepanos and ancho problanos. Instead of making them into leather, I dried them to point when you can take a table knife and crack them. DH loves to use them this way to make chili.

I did Cheyenne this year. I did them in the dehydrator and pulverized some in my food processor. Needless to say i still have two huge 5 gallon buckets that need ground to powder. I thought I my lungs were going to collapse when I took the lid off the processor. Good thing a little goes a long way.

 

[897tgigvib]

In Korea, folks dry their Peppers on blankets in the sun. Then they powder them to flakes. The flakes are used in recipes, especially winter Kimche.