How to Roast Peppers

As you know, I’ve been joking this summer about how my husband has been trying to take over our vegetable garden. This year, he grew a ton of peppers in our hoop house, which we’ve been using in tomato sauce and salsa, and for cooking. Recently, Bill decided to roast peppers, which I think is a great way to preserve them.

This is his first season for roasting them, plus he froze a some of them to see if that was a viable method for saving some of the harvest. It turns out that it works great. (I guess this means I’ll have to keep him, right?)

Bill says it’s quite simple to roast peppers. After picking and washing a bunch of them, he drizzled some olive oil on them, heated up our barbecue grill and placed several of them on the grill at a time.

About every 3 minutes, he turned them until the skin was blistered and blackened. (in our case, this took a total of 5-8 minutes) If you click on the photo to the right, you can see how the skin is becoming more transparent and blistering.

At that point, Bill removed them and placed some of them inside a paper sack, and the rest of them onto a cookie sheet with placed a towel over them. The purpose of each method is to let them cool (which takes about 30 minutes) and also to let them steam a bit so it will be easy to remove their skins.

Once cool, he peeled off the skins, cut open the peppers, and removed the seeds and membranes. The final step was to place portion sizes into plastic bags, then place those bags inside a larger freezer bag, and put that into the freezer.

We weren’t sure how well they’d freeze so we kept the first batch in the freezer for about 10 days, then thawed out a portion of them to use in some sandwiches, and the peppers were delicious.

Even though it sounds like there are a few steps to do this, roasting peppers is not time-consuming and it’s another great way to enjoy them later!