Canning Homegrown Aji Limon Peppers – October 2010

You might remember these peppers from last year, when I received a random bag of them from my farmer neighbor, which I ended up canning into 2 pints of finished peppers. Well with the saved seeds from last year’s peppers, I was able to grow about 6 plants with varying degree of vigor. But after a roller coaster of a year, that included a freak hailstorm in early spring, as well as an early frost in the beginning of October. I thought that I wouldn’t take any more chances, and process all the ripen peppers before another frost rolled into town.

After giving all the plants a quick once over, I picked all the Aji that were fully yellow or over 50% yellow. There still seems to be about another pint jars worth of green Aji spread among all the plants. So for now, I left all of those alone to see if they would ripen before the garden fully dies off, or I might try to dry them into Aji flakes, depending on the weather forecast this week. Since I’ve already heard word about frost again on Wednesday night. So I’ll have to make a decision pretty quickly, on whether to let them ripen, or dry them out.

But for this being my first Aji Limon crop, I have to say that I was pretty satisfied with the yield results. And thinking ahead for next years crop, I made sure to save the seeds from about a dozen peppers off of the highest yielding plants, just to have some strong plant genetics for next years plants. I only have about a dozen seeds left over from the original peppers that I received. So I was worried big time this year that I wasn’t going to be able to harvest any peppers, since then I would be really SOL for next year. Seeing how I’ve never seen Aji Limon seeds for sale in any of my seed catalogs, let along at the local garden center, but lucky for me that wasn’t the case this year.

In canning this year’s batch of Aji Limon, I went a different route from last year. In that I didn’t do an overnight pre-brining of the peppers before canning them. This year I just sliced them up, packed them into jars, covered them with onions and pickling liquid, and processed them like I would a batch of jalapenos.

On kind of a side note, I finally cracked open a jar of the Jalapeno hot sauce that I made a few months back, and it tasted awesome. So for canning the Aji, I used the same pickling liquid as for the Jalapeno hot sauce. But instead of making the Aji into a hot sauce with the pickling liquid, I just pretending like I was making pickled jalapenos rings instead.

And without further ado, the details on canning this years batch of Aji Limon:

The Peppers:

  • 1lbs 6.6oz of Aji Limon peppers, sliced into rings (final trim weight 20.2 oz)

Pickling liquid (makes one batch):

  • 5 cups white vinegar
  • 1 cup water
  • 4 tsp canning salt
  • 2 TB sugar
  • 5 cloves garlic
  • 3 TB Lemon juice
  • 1 medium yellow onion, diced

Quick step-by-step:
Wash the peppers, and trim off their stems. Then slice each pepper into 3-4 rings, and set aside. While cutting up the peppers, bring the pickling liquid to a boil, and simmer for at least 15 minutes. Once the peppers are trimmed and sliced, and the liquid is done simmering. Pack the peppers in the jars, top with some of the cooked onions and the pickling liquid. Remove any air bubbles, and process using the time listed below.

Process:
10 minutes in a boiling water canner

Final yield:
3 pints

Side Notes:
1) My original estimate was that I would only need 4 cups of pickling liquid. But seeing how I didn’t want to do the math to recalculate the pickling liquid recipe for 4 cups, I stuck with the original recipe for 6 cups. And it was a good thing that I did. Since I ended up using all 6 cups between the three pint jars, with no waste.
2) As something a little different for this year, I topped each jar with about a 1-2 TB of the onions that were boiled with the pickling liquid. Who know what it will add to the final product, but I though that I would test it out, rather then threw them in the trash.
3) Surprising I wasn’t too effected by the vapors while cutting up the Aji. But it probably helps that I didn’t cook the Aji beforehand. Because if I did, it might have been worse then my reaction to the red jalapenos that I made into hot sauce.

One comment on “Canning Homegrown Aji Limon Peppers – October 2010”

  • Thanks for this, I’m going to use this recipe in a couple of weeks before I start over-wintering my plants! 🙂

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