Everyone has their own little hobbies, which are difficult for others to understand. One of my goals is to research tips on social networks that are applicable to cooking, in order to improve the speed and simplicity of different actions that we often repeat at home. For example, something as basic as cleaning your peppers.
Chili peppers (Photo: iStock)
Because cleaning this vegetable is one of the most basic things you can do in the kitchen. There’s nothing mysterious about it…is there? If you want to get it done quickly, it’s there, which involves removing all seeds in as few steps as possible. Otherwise, removing them all could take forever. At least I couldn’t stop until I had it completely cleaned.
Well, on the @thermotrucos account I found a very helpful tip for cleaning large peppers when they are fresh. Something as simple as pressing the pepper stems inward can make the task much easier.. Most importantly, it significantly reduces time.
Normally we tend to cut around the peduncle and pull it up, but there is a high risk that the many seeds inside the pepper will fall off. If you do it the other way around, as you can see in the video, when you open the pepper, most of the seeds are together. This will take you a while.
And pepitas?
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With Italian peppers, the technique of pressing the stem or peduncle tightly inward is more complicated to succeed. You can give it a try, but you can also choose a safer plan.
On the board, round the stem area with an incision no deeper than the skin and extract it outward by pulling on the stem. The most common thing that happens is that everything comes in clumps along with the seeds.there are very few loose ones inside and they will fall out on their own when you open the peppers and flip them over onto the board.
Around the stem, if you don’t dig too much, there may be some pepper meat left, which you can recycle and discard the rest in an organic container.
What if they get roasted?
We doubled down on the stakes and opted for the most difficult one yet: cleaning roasted peppers without seeds, which turned into an endless ordeal.
If you opt for something like roasted peppers, you can save a week’s worth of dinners without having to turn on the fire or re-serve the same dish.
The first thing you should do is let them bake a lot. Don’t worry about the skin turning black in places: it will come out faster and act as a protective shield for the meat, which will be juicy and very tasty.
In addition, in order to let the skins rise on their own, you can put them in a bowl on plastic wrap when they are taken out of the oven, and let them generate moisture inside while they are still hot, and the skins will separate on their own. Of course, if they cool down, this trick doesn’t work because the skin sticks back together.
For seeds, the problem is more complicated. Of all the methods we’ve tried, the best is to clean them with a filter and then place the filter on top of the container where the juice falls. Place them face down with the stems close to the filter and pull them down.
There will be seeds left, but much less than opening them in other ways. Then, squeeze whatever’s left in the strainer (including the skins) well to get more juice from the peppers.