Dehydrating Peppers and Saving Pepper Seeds

Our peppers have done pretty well this year [especially the hot peppers :) but that's a post for next time - Home Canned Salsa Roja - stay tuned!!]. This year instead of dicing and freezing the peppers I decided to dice and dehydrate them. I am really trying to get away from depending on my freezer so much and since I only use the peppers for sauces, who cares if they are frozen or dehydrated prior to use?

In order to know exactly how much dehydrated peppers equals one serving (I consider one serving a half of a cup of small diced peppers) I simply put a half cup of freshly diced peppers on ONE tray and then filled the remaining trays as usual.

In all I got 4 full trays plus the one tray with one serving. Each tray contained 6-7 servings, so that's over 24 servings. Not too bad I guess? This yielded almost one packed quart of dehydrated peppers. 1/8c dry equals 1/2c fresh. To rehydrate, simply put 1/8c dry peppers into a half cup measuring device, fill with filtered water and allow to sit until rehydrated.

Saving pepper seeds is super easy. Hot or sweet, the procedure is the same: simply set aside the seeds to dry for about a week. Once dry, store in a cool, dry place. Be sure to label the drying seeds!! You can see below that I just set the bowls over a paper with the seed description. I then taped the paper to each bowl just in case it got bumped or moved around. Of course your seeds must be heirloom to properly reproduce.