How to Roast Peppers

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

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

Roast Peppers: Bill’s technique

Bill says it’s quite simple to roast peppers. After picking and washing a bunch of them, he drizzled some olive oil on them. Then he 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. They took a total of 5-8 minutes for us. Notice in the photo to the right how the skin is becoming more transparent and blistering.

At that point, Bill removed them and placed some of them inside a paper sack. He put the rest of them onto a cookie sheet with placed a towel over them. Each method allows them to cool (which takes about 30 minutes). It also lets 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. The bags went into a larger freezer bag, and Bill 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. We 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!