A popular food truck condiment in Hawaii is Hawaiian chili pepper sauce. It’s sort of the local equivalent of Tabasco,except that it’s not fermented. Or orange. The plant itself isn’t native to Hawaii, but many people have one growing somewhere in their yard.
When I first installed my 6 inch tall pepper plant, I thought I was going to lose it to white flies, but after correcting the watering situation I was able to fight them off with neem oil and they haven’t been back to bother it. Soon it had grown into a hardy little bush. Then, about the time it began setting fruit, the leaves started to curl and show signs of what my husband thinks is probably tobacco mosaic virus (our sweet peppers and tomatoes have been afflicted in the past). Despite this, it still produced ample little green chilies. Some time passed before I began to realize that while we had plenty of peppers, none of them seemed to ever ripen. The mystery was solved when I discovered a half eaten red pepper still on the plant. The local birds, it seems, have a pretty good tolerance for spice.
Bird netting fixed that problem, and before long my bushy green plant (which still looked kind of healthy when viewed from afar) was dotted with red. Great, I had peppers. Now what?
A quick internet search revealed that chili pepper water seems to be the only recipe commonly made with these. I whipped up a tasty batch using this recipe: http://www.slashfood.com/2006/03/05/chili-pepper-water-popular-hawaiian-condiment/
I used some of the ginger that I have stored in my freezer. It is very good, but the recipe makes two cups, enough to last me into the next decade, and it only calls for 8-10 peppers. I have like 300. So now what?
I had been reluctant to use these little guys like I would other chilies, as they are exceptionally HOT. My dad tried to make salsa with a few last year and the result was beyond even his heat tolerance. After more reading, I finally settled on making my own dried chile powder.
I picked about 60 or 70 ripe peppers, some of them already drying on the plant. I remembered, thankfully, to put on latex gloves before seeding them. They have very little flesh so peeling is not possible or necessary. I pulled off the stems and used kitchen scissors to slice up one side, then my thumbnail to scrape out the seeds. Despite the use of gloves, my fingers were still burning a little several hours later.
It would be no problem to dry the little peppers out in the sun or even on the counter, but I have a food dehydrator so I popped them in overnight. By morning, they had transformed into a wispy pile of brittle, papery little skins. Now, I am well aware of how hot these are based on past experiences. Still, when a piece got caught in the breeze and drifted over to the counter, I impulsively decided to taste it straight. After all, I had removed the seeds, which contains like 90% of the heat, right?
Perhaps a rational person would have gingerly placed a little flake on their tongue as a test. Not me. I just stuck the whole thing in my mouth – it was tiny, after all– and chewed. After maybe three seconds I was thinking they were,indeed, very spicy. After seven or so seconds I began to realize that I was in for some discomfort, and by the ten second mark I was looking frantically around the kitchen for a knife to cut off my tongue. Sweating, I quickly downed two glasses of water, but as any connoisseur of spice knows, the relief was fleeting. It was eight in the morning and I wasn’t quite desperate enough to crack open a beer as first aid, not yet anyway, so I settled on carbohydrate therapy and stuffed some pita bread in my mouth, then sniffled and wiped my eyes and chewed until the pain began to abate.
After regaining some capacity to function, I forged ahead to grind my dried peppers. I had come so far, there was no backing out now. We have an old inexpensive coffee grinder that we use to grind spices. I ground the peppers to fine powder and lifted the lid to check my work. I immediately began coughing uncontrollably as I backed out of the kitchen. My son walked in from inside at that moment and started coughing, too. As I retreated to the far corner of the living room, I imagined a S.W.A.T. team throwing Hawaiian chile powder into a room instead of tear gas, or crazed scientists sending envelopes of the orange powder to public figures, and thought maybe this feature was marketable. Maybe I could develop my own line of pepper spray. “Self defense, the all natural and organic way.”
When the hot zone had become habitable again, I was able to transfer the powder to a spice jar and even get a whiff of the fruity, complex aroma without incident. The yield was about a tablespoon, which sounds like a lot of effort for very little product, but I think a little will go a long way, and my plant doesn’t even look like I harvested from it.
Oh, and remember the seeds? I had about half a cup of seeds and stems left after cleaning the peppers. I threw them to the chickens, who gobbled them up like they were nothing. If the terrorists ever engage in chemical warfare using hot peppers, the last ones standing will undoubtedly be the birds.
Aloha.
