How to make chili relish... EASY recipe with photos
The cold days and nights showed down the growth of my habaneros and they are no longer ripening, so I decided to pick all of them and make green habanero relish. I got some more fresh Russian garlic from my neighbor yesterday so I am stocked up again. Here is a shot of the basket from the garden with habanero peppers and fresh flowering dill heads, showing the proportions of chilis to dill to garlic that I decided to use - every batch is different, depending on my mood.
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First I de-stemmed the chilis and then rinsed them of any dirt, pollen, etc that might have come in on them.
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while the peppers were draining in the sink, I turned my attention to the other raw ingredients - garlic and dill.
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Since the garlic still has dried dirt on the outer skins, I took off the outer skins first and separated the cloves, and washed off my workspace. This looks like a lot of garlic, but I really should have used more. To peel garlic really quickly, lay a clove on either of it's flattest sides, take a sharp knife and slice off a thin bit of the root end of the clove, and when you get through the meat of the clove, do not continue to slice. Instead, turn your blade horizontally and trap the hard skin against your cutting board and roll the clove up and away from the knife. This usually takes off a big piece of skin and loosens other areas so you can quickly pull it off. You notice that I use thin flexible cutting board. These are great, and they don't develop deep grooves like the thick soft poly boards. When you've got stuff chopped up, just roll up the edges of the board and dump them into the pot.
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Once I had the cloves of garlic peeled, I turned to the dill. You don't have to add dill, but I like the flavor and we still have a lot of it in the garden, so in it goes. You can use dill weed (leaves of the plant) or seeded heads, but if you can get flowering dill heads, by all means, do so. The yellow florets are the richest-tasting parts of the plant. Here I show how much of the heads you use. I illustrate this with a knife, but I don't strip of the florets with a knife. It's a lot faster pinching them off between my thumbnail and index finger.
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Here is the prepped food ready to be processed.
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I use a small food processor. It makes quick work of the chopping, and if you're careful, you can limit your contact with habanero juice. The garlic and chilies can be chopped in any order. I showed a few of each because it looked good.
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Here's a shot of some chopped ingredients. Notice the spatula. You do not want to be tempted to scrape out the sides of the processor bowl with your fingers.
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Here are the processed vegetables in the pot, joined by the dill flowers.
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NOTE: Here is the recipe. It's all you need to know, and it is so simple you can't screw it up even if you claim to be a terrible cook.
Get out a measuring cup and a big jug of cider vinegar. Keeping count, add vinegar cup by cup until the vinegar gets about to the top of the chopped ingredients. When the liquid level is right, add one teaspoon of non-iodized canning salt, one teaspoon of cane sugar and two tablespoons of molasses per cup of vinegar. I needed exactly 4 cups of vinegar for this batch.
Because of the opportunity for misinterpretation, and because I don't want to be liable for someone else's mistakes, I won't describe the process by which I canned the chili relish. You can buy a book from Ball, Kerr, or any other company that produces the jars, lids, and accessories, and they will clue you in about pH levels, safe processing times and temperatures, etc. Rest assured, the relish was transferred to sterile jars, topped with sterile lids, and processed in a boiling-water bath for 20 minutes. The batch you saw here yielded 13 half-pint jars.
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There you have it. A recipe that you can make at home with store-bought ingredients if you don't have a garden, and the ingredients for the liquid can be naturally scaled to any size batch. If you do 10 habaneros, for instance, you will probably need only 1/2 cup of vinegar, so 1/2 tsp of salt and sugar and one tbsp of molasses. Could it be any easier?