

A chipotle pepper is a jalapeno that has been smoked, a food preservation method as old as agriculture itself. With a bumper crop of jalapenos, pimentos and roasting peppers in need of attention, I smoked two batches of peppers in my biochar trench, with wonderful results. Here’s my report.



The Site

Last fall, I dug a 1.5-by-8 foot trench in an area that had been overrun with perennial weeds. During the winter, I partially burned two small mountains of brambles and other hard-to-compost woody materials. This summer, I grew a successful crop of winter squash in the refilled trench, and reopened it for my pepper smoking project in mid-September. Some folks disapprove of all open burning, but I think most rural homesteads need a safe place to burn stuff from time to time. At our house, we’re experimenting with filling this need with a thoughtfully managed and monitored biochar trench. The terra preta soils of the Amazon, upon which the concept of biochar is based, were created over many centuries of successive smoulderings, so I am curious as to the long-term effects of fire in the hole.



The Fire

You can smoke peppers in a covered grill or smoker, but we don’t eat much meat so I have neither. Smoking peppers calls for a cool fire that flavors and dries the peppers (as opposed to cooking them), so I built a small fire in the middle of the trench, and placed pairs of bricks covered with aluminum foil (for cleanliness) at both ends to hold my trays of peppers. I used apple wood saved from pruning, but you can also use hickory, mesquite, or other aromatic woods.

Once the wood was burning well, I partially snuffed the fire with soil, placed the trays of prepared peppers (see below) on the bricks, and covered the trench with a piece of metal roofing. An hour or so later, when I saw only faint wisps of smoke coming from the trench, I restarted the fire with fresh dry twigs and a little more wood. My peppers got a total of three hours of smoking time.

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