Hot Pepper Jam
Whole hot peppers cooked down with sugar and vinegar. Made at home, carried in a tube, spooned onto everything.
- calories
- 130
- weight
- 1 oz
- cal / oz
- 130
- protein
- 0 g
- serves
- 12, scales
- prep
- 1 min
- cook
- 0 min
- total time
- 1 min
- water
- none
- cost
- $
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Lunch
- Dinner
- Snack
- No cook
- Backpacking
- Car camping
- Basecamp
- Bikepacking
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
- Gluten free
- Dairy free
- Nut free
- Eat in the bag
- Pre-mix at home
- Shelf stable
- Basic
Ingredients
| Hot peppers | 1 lb | weighed whole and uncleaned, stems and seeds still in |
|---|---|---|
| Plain table vinegar | 1 cup | |
| Sugar | 2 cups | |
| Salt | 1/2 tsp |
Method
- At home: stem the peppers and chop them, seeds and all if you want the full heat. Wear gloves.
- At home: cover them with the vinegar in a pot and simmer 15 minutes, until the skins go slack.
- At home: add the sugar and salt and keep it at a low boil, stirring, until a spoonful dragged across the pan leaves a track that closes slowly. Roughly 30 minutes.
- At home: pack it hot into a squeeze tube or small screw-top jar and let it cool sealed.
- In camp: squeeze a spoonful onto whatever is bland. No heat, no water, no pot.
Sugar and vinegar together are a preservative, which is the only reason a jar of cooked peppers can ride in a pack in July. The sugar ties up water the way it does in any jam, the vinegar drops the pH, and nothing much grows in that. Cook it until it sheets off the spoon and it will hold for months sealed.
This is a condiment, not a meal, and it exists because trail food is bland by design. A spoonful turns instant rice, ramen, or a tortilla with cheese into something you notice. Weighing the peppers whole and uncleaned is how the original recipe does it, so a pound of small thin-walled chiles yields less finished jam than a pound of fat ones. Fine either way; you are not canning to a shelf label.
Packing
A 4 oz silicone squeeze tube holds about a week of it and does not break in a pack. A screw-top jar works for car camping. Once opened on trail it keeps fine unrefrigerated for a week or so; the sugar and vinegar are doing that work.
Variations
- Cut the sugar to 1 1/2 cups for something closer to a sauce than a jam.
- Half sweet peppers, half hot, if you want to spread it thick instead of dab it.
- A strip of lemon peel simmered with the vinegar and pulled before jarring.
https://savoriurbane.com/dulceata-de-ardei-iute-reteta-simpla