How To Pickle Red Peppers

Hi. I'm Matt Kemp from the Underground Cookery School, and today I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. Today, I'm going to show you how to pickle red pepper.

Now, before we actually pickle the red pepper, I'm going to show you how to create the vinegar and spice pickle. Well, to create the pickling sauce, or liquid, the supermarkets have now just made this job dead easy. You can actually buy jars of pickling vinegars, and you can also get little jars of pickling spice, and the reality is all we need to do is take the vinegar, which I've got here, and just pour that, the whole lot, into a pan.

And I'm going to use about a third of a jar, maybe a bit more, of the pickling spices. Throw that into the pan. Now, what we need to do is we'll put the lid on, because I want to bring the vinegar up to the boil.

And as soon as that comes up to the boil, we're then going to pass everything through the sieve here, into the jug. What we'll then do is use these preserving jars to create our pickle. Well, as you can see, that's now come up to the boil, and I'm just going to take it off the heat.

And what I'm going to do, you can really see the steam coming out of it now, is just pass the vinegar through a fine chinois, in this case, just the sieve, a fine sieve. There we go. Just capture all those spices.

There we go, and there you have the perfect spicing liquor. So we've got our pickling liquor, or pickling vinegar here, and I'm going to show you how to pickle red peppers. The first rule of pickling is make sure that this jar that you pickle in has always been sterilized, which means keeping it in a steamed environment of at least 86% for a minimum of three minutes.

That's in order to kill off any bacteria. Remember, these could be pickling in here for months on end, and you want a completely bacteria free vacuum from which the pickle can work. So you could boil this in water, or put it in a dishwasher.

A dishwasher is absolutely fine, but just make sure the jar that you pickle in has cooled down completely before you put anything in it, because the reaction of change in temperature is going to crack the glass. So make sure that's cool. All I've done here, is I've just sliced these red peppers in here.

I'm going to plonk them in. I'm going to add a little bit of the pickling spice. So we've got some mustard seeds, we've also got some coriander seeds, there's some black pepper in there, whatever you fancy.

That's the whole beauty of pickling. You can create your own recipe. Just use this as a basic template.

So whatever you want to put in there. You may even put stuff you've already pickled in there, or you want to mix pickling, so maybe put some onions in with the red pepper. But what I'm going to do now is just cover the ingredients with the pickling vinegar, and what I should really do is just wait for that to completely cool down, but we're almost there.

If we weren't shooting, I would leave it to one side or possibly put it outside just to cool down that much quicker. But once it's completely cool, you can just close it up. It might be a nice idea to put some sort of sticky sort of homemade sort of Granny-ish label on, and then give that away as a perfect Christmas gift.

But that my friends, is how to pickle red peppers.