Drying and Milling Chiles for Chile Powder
How to dehydrate and grind chile peppers, with recipes for chili powder and custom spice blends using fresh homegrown and/or exotic store bought chiles. Preserve expensive and/or hard to find chiles.
Save jars of single-variety chile powder or combine them into custom chili powders and spice blends. Some varieties of chiles can be expensive and/or hard to find, so don’t let a treasure trove of chiles go to waste.
Buy a coffee grinder just for grinding chiles if you are at all worried about your coffee tasting like chiles. (Which could be kind of cool sometimes but probably not all the time.)
Be sure to watch the step by step video below.
Ingredients
Fresh chiles of your choice
Instructions
Wash chiles and cut into ¼-inch slices. (Small chiles like chiltepin can be left whole.)
Layer them in the dehydrator. Set it to low. It will take about 12 hours for the chiles to dry thoroughly.
Put the dried chiles in the coffee grinder and blend to a fine powder.
Save in an airtight container for up to six months.