My husband has many colleagues with gardens who share their surplus bounty. He has brought home many bags of zucchini, tomatoes, and oranges none of which go to waste. One day, my husband brought home a jar of jalapeño jelly that one coworker made as a special treat. I have had mint jelly that we used for pork roasts but never heard about one made with spicy peppers. His colleague suggested that we dab a bit of the jalapeño jelly with cream cheese on crackers and WOW, it was so tasty - a perfect blend of sweet and spicy!
I became curious about other ways we could enjoy this jelly and found many creative suggestions. These included a glaze or sauce for meats, a vinaigrette dressing, on ham or turkey sandwich (use pepper jelly instead of mustard), a bagel with cream cheese, and a stir-fry sauce. There are so many other great ideas for our newfound and tasty treat.
We reached out to my husband's colleague for the pepper jelly recipe so that we could try to make our own. There are also many pepper jelly recipes online. But first, as any dedicated gardener, we had to grow our own hot peppers for the recipe. We had good results with two Zone 9 varieties of peppers: the Havasu and Jalapeño.
Havasu is a delicious Santa Fe-type hot pepper. It was a delight to have this plant in the garden because it has beautiful pepper color variations – yellow, orange, and deep red - that reveal pepper ripeness. The peppers are medium-sized, thick, and coned-shaped. They are typically used when yellow for pickling, but we let ours ripen to a beautiful red. They make excellent potted plants, like full sun, need consistent deep watering, and usually mature around 60-80 days after planting.
The Jalapeño is a hot chili pepper. These peppers are small to medium-sized and remain a vibrant green throughout most of maturing process. Unlike the Havasu peppers, the Jalapeño peppers should be picked while green. Like the Havasu, they do well in pots. They do best in full sun with consistent deep watering and take from 60 to 120 days to mature, depending on the variety.
We found that growing hot peppers is fun and simple. Both plants are thriving and producing the peppers that we will use for our next culinary adventure making the spicy jelly.