I love me a pile of delicious sour pepperoncini with my sandwich. Or just to snack on during a hot summer day. I usually drink all the juice as the jar too. Lets talk about growing, fermenting and storing the delicious, wrinkly little things.
I just posted this video on making pepperoncini, but I have articles on the subject from way back. I didn’t know when I first decided to grow and process my own that I would be in for such a learning curve. This was in the early days of the internet, perhaps going on 20 years ago. I first tried recipes using a vinegar pickle, basically, some salt, vinegar and water followed by sterilization in a water bath. That was a huge disappointment and not even worth eating. Clearly, the pepperoncini I was buying were not made that way.
So I decided they must be fermented. At the time the internet was barely hip to fermenting anything. I know, it is crazy to think that now, but seriously, you could find a few saurkraut recipes, but that was about it. Now fermentation supplies are sold widely and blog moms and health nuts have spewed forth a whole internet subgenera of fermentation content. I was lucky to find one Hungarian sun pickle recipe and adapted that to fermenting my peppers. Bingo, they were delicious, this was the key.
Well, they were pretty delicious, but the first few varieties I grew were not quite what I wanted. So, I began looking for seeds and testing varieties. Seed varieties were not that prolific on the net yet either though. I had to hunt pretty hard to find a handful of varieties to try, and they were mostly foreign imports. I learned that shishito peppers, in spite of the appearance, are not like pepperoncini at all. Most of the others were ho hum. I eventually settled on two varieties, Stavros and Sigaretta di Bergamo.
Stavros is a Greek variety that is crunchy and a little bit hot. It you insist on crunch, this is a good choice. To someone that does not like hot foods, these will be too hot. They are blunt and wrinkly, just like the pepperoncini you can buy in jars.
Sigaretta di Bergamo, which I usually shorten to SigBerg, is a long, skinny, pointed variety from Italy. This variety is my favorite. When pickled, they are very tender. They are not soft or mushy, just tender and delicious. The ones I have grown are not hot. I have tried several batches of seed trying to find the original strain that I had. The ones I ordered recently from a Swiss seed house seem to be the closest and I plan to save seed this time! A similar variety is Lombardo, though they haven’t ever seemed quite as good to me.
I’m quite sure there are many more great varieties out there. We now have a lot more options for finding many vegetable varieties from all over the world.
In general, pepperoncini are all extremely productive and easy to grow. Just keep up with water and fertilizing through the season.
Time of harvest is pretty important. I like them to be about full sized, but still immature. If they are too young, they can be bitter and too old they will be tough and not as tasty. I look for full sized peppers that have not plumped up yet. At the right stage, they still have a lean look to them, where the wrinkles are not filled out yet. Older peppers look more smoothed over and often more glossy, with thicker fleshed walls. It is a subtle distinction, but an important one. Getting them at the right stage can mean picking about every 3 to 5 days.
I'll leave processing instructions to the video, but I’d like to talk about the fermentation system and storage. You can only eat so many of these at a time and if you have 6 healthy plants, you could end up with a couple gallons of finished peppers, coming in over just a few months. Heat canning them just ruins them and besides that, you kill off all the beneficial bacteria. Canning is just another unnecessary step anyway. Instead, I use the carbon dioxide produced in fermentation to protect them from spoilage during storage. I have stored them for over a year on the shelf and they usually come out the other side perfectly good. Sometimes you will get a bad batch, but I think that has to do with what organisms make it into the ferment and which dominate. That war goes on during fermentation, not after, so if you open a jar and it’s bad, it was probably bad when you put it away.
Most fermentation systems do not allow for that blanket of protective carbon dioxide. All method probably have their pros and cons, but this is an essential function to me, becasue it allows for long storage without refrigeration. My goal is to have pepperoncini through much of the year. If you let air in and then put them in the fridge, they will keep much longer than they will at room temperature, but not long enough. They will still spoil, just slower. Besides, what serious fermenter has room for all those jars in the fridge?
To acheive this effect requires a small degree of management. I start ferments with a very, very light turning down of the lid, just to where it barely starts to catch. This light lid pressure allows the gasses to escape easily, without building up pressure that is going to cause a lot of spill-over, yet it still prevents the entrance of air. That airlock effect prevents any kind of scum from forming on the top of the ferment. Later, when fermentation is mostly over, I will snug them down just a bit tighter, then crank it down hard before storage. If the jar is opened after fermentation is completely over, air is allowed in, which will allow spoilage organisms to grow.
Many fermenters expect there to be a white film of stuff growing on the top of ferments. This same growth, will eventually produce off flavors and spoil a ferment, even in the refrigerator. I propose that if people in the past had the technology to prevent this scum completely, that they would have used it. Now we do, so get with the times and exclude the air these spoilage organisms need to survive.
So, if managed correctly, we get no scums to skim off or affect the flavor, we have very little to no spill over, and a protective layer of carbon dioxide for long term storage. Using canning seals is not ideal. They rust eventually and any small amount of rust that makes it into the jar will change the color and affect the flavor. I plan to work on an improved system at some point, but I have used canning seals with plastic lids to good effect, for probably hundreds of jars of food now.
Watch the video for details on processing pepperoncini or other whole peppers. The same brine and method can be used for other pickled vegetables.
