I have a friend who is big into gardening. He starts his own plants and must have a great system because he has the biggest and most prolific plants I have ever seen. This spring he gave me several tomato and pepper plants. I don't have a garden so I passed them on to my daughters. There were many different varieties. All of the plants produced very well. I would usually get 1 or 2 peppers per plant, but these were loaded.
I didn't want to see any go to waste so I experimented with drying some. I picked 12 small green and red peppers. I diced them with my favorite Vidalia chop wizard (http://www.thecabincountess.com/2012/12/a-day-of-recovery.html). I had exactly 4 cups. I don't have a dehydrator but I put the diced peppers on parchment paper on the air fryer rack in my Ninja oven. I used the dehydrator setting which was 150 degrees.
I dried them for 7 hours stirring every couple hours. Eventually they were very dry to the touch.
4 cups of diced peppers turned into 3/4 cup of dried peppers.
To make it simple:
12 peppers = 4 cups diced peppers = 3/4 cup dried peppers =1/3 cup ground pepper
I think it's amazing there is that much water in vegetables. I did the math and a heaping teaspoon (1.33 t) is equal to 1 pepper. It smells really good. I am not sure what I will use it in, but there are a lot of recipes that this could be added to for additional flavor.
