Dried Cayenne Peppers

One of the things I most enjoy about SAVING THE SEASON is that preserving makes you think about the future. What will you be eating in the months ahead and with whom? What dishes will you want to eat? What will you need to cook them?

Winter food wants chile peppers. During the dark months, almost every meal I cook will have a side dish of green vegetables plucked from the cruciferous kingdom. This hearty, life-affirming nation has both a leafy clan—encompassing kale, chard, mustard greens, cabbages, collards and the like—and a crunchy tribe including broccoli, brussels sprouts and cauliflower. Every single one of them can be blanched in salty water and sauteed in hot olive oil spiked with garlic and a crushed chile pepper. If I have lemons on the tree, I'll dash out to pick a bright new one and squeeze it, cold from the night air, over the greens. But that's all you need to do for a dish that is superlative from a nutritional point of view and absolutely satisfying in the guts.

The chile pepper adds what David Tanis in his cookbook A Platter of Figs calls "the capiscum perk." He writes:

I believe many Western dishes can benefit from a little chile—fresh or dried....I can't resist buying fresh chiles whenever I see them. Inevitably, though, this compulsion results in a collection of shriveled, half-dry, and dried chiles hanging around in my house. But I always manage to work the semidried chiles into a braise, or in a marinade. And when they're dried, I make my own chile powder (thanks to a spice grinder) without going to the store.

As the nights get longer and cooler (yes even in LA it gets chilly enough for a sweater—last night it was 60 at Greenvalley), I've been thinking about Tuscan kale. It's what I immediately thought about the other day when I saw a box of fresh cayenne chiles at farmer James Birch's stand at the Santa Monica Farmers Market. To eat kale in November, I need to dry chiles now. The payoff may come later on the plate, but as with most home preserving, even the labor of preparing today for tomorrow's meal is time happily spent.

DRIED CHILE PEPPERS

This is less a recipe than a common-sense strategy for quickly air-drying your fresh chiles. If you've ever been to Santa Fe, you've seen ristras—strings of chiles hanging from the rafters—and that's what this is. In her book Pickled, Potted and Canned, food writer Sue Shepard notes the preservative effect of capsaicin—the fire in chiles—and it's true that I've never seen fresh chiles mold before they dry. In addition to their uses in savory cooking, chiles also add welcome zip to pickles and even some jams—check back later in the fall for SPICY PUMPKIN BUTTER.

2 pounds small, thin chile peppers like cayenne

6 feet of kitchen twine

a trussing needle or any other large needle

1 thread your needle, double the string back on itself and tie off the ends with a bulky triple knot.

2 taking one chile at a time, run it through with the needle at the thickest part just beneath the stem cap. carefully pull the needle through and push the chile down the thread to the knot.

3 repeat one at a time until all the chiles are threaded. cut the thread off at the needle and knot the end in a loop. You've now got a ristra. Hang your ristra someplace with lots of air flow but out of the direct sun. The chiles will shrivel in a few days, but leave them hanging for 10 days or more until fully dry. At that point, you can just let them hang where the are, or you can store them in the cupboard in a paper sack. They'll last a long time.