padrón pepper jelly

I recently harvested about forty padrón peppers and an additional 20 jalapeños from what had been a particularly fruitful fall garden. Particularly prolific were volunteer cherry tomatoes, which popped up out of the ground all over my front yard and yielded two or three pints a week, depending on how constantly I went to picking. It's all gone now, sadly. We had a recent polar blast that forced me to harvest what I could in preparation for a week of perpetual freezes--hence the bounty of hot peppers. This was sad because my romaine seeds took forever to germinate and only started spouting in early November. If the frost had held out, I might have harvested about twelve heads of the stuff. The arugula was also ready for a second sprouting before the freeze, but the rocket had already provided us with a month and a half of weekly salads.

padrón me, jalapeño

But I digress.

It was time for two batches of hot pepper jelly. I followed my old formula of circa 20 peppers (majority padrón) for each batch. I chopped them coarsely, dropped them in the blender along with enough seeds to be mildly terrifying, added one cup of cider vinegar (white vinegar in the second batch), and processed.

I dropped that mess into a pot, added another cup of cider vinegar (again, white vinegar in the second batch), 6 tbsps of dry pectin, and brought to a rolling boil. Then I added 5 cups of sugar, boiled for one minute, and removed from heat.

Each batch filled six 8 oz. canning jars. I cleaned and sterilized the jars ahead of time, and then let them sit in hot (very hot) water while I cooked the peppers. Then I brought out six jars (for each batch, added the jelly, tightened down the lids, and returned the jars to the hot water. The water was too hot to touch comfortably, and I did not allow the water to touch the actual lid--that is, the water came up to the mouth of the jar. I let each batch sit for about ten minutes, then pulled them out and dried them off. As the jelly cooled, it sucked down the lids of each of the jars.

So there it is. My recipe diverges from the standard ones in that it uses about a cup less sugar. Granted, the pectin I used advertised that you need "no sugar" or "less sugar" than normal.