My husband and I really love pickled hot peppers, especially when they're extra spicy. That's why we preserve them in large quantities for the winter (and that's not counting spicy adjika and Georgian-style eggplant – you can find these recipes on our website in the "World of Preserves" section, along with many other, very diverse ones).
Unfortunately, both are highly acidic, so we don't use vinegar much. So we decided to search online to see if there was a way to preserve without vinegar at all. And yep! We found it. But our joy lasted only two or three days.
We followed the recipes from the internet step by step:
- We washed the jars and sterilized them along with the lids.
- Washed the pepper.
- The stems were cut off.
- They were chopped (I did this in different ways and even whole, because I canned it both with and without vinegar (according to my own proportions)).
- Then we boiled the water, poured it over the peppers, drained it, boiled it again, and poured it over them again. Note that I did this twice without the brine (just in case), but the recipes call for just one brine.
- Next, we prepared a standard brine with salt and sugar, poured it into the jars and sealed them.
- They placed it upside down under the “fur coat”.
I specifically labeled the jars of peppers without vinegar. To do this, I needed scissors, tape, a pen, and cut strips of paper. I wrote "No Vinegar" on each strip.
After that, I unrolled the tape and placed strips of paper on it at a distance from each other. Then I cut them. And I glued them onto jars or lids. This is how it turned out.
Result: after 2-4 days (somehow the jars swelled one after the other) I noticed this:
I had to open all the jars and repeat the entire procedure step by step, but this time with vinegar.
