It's been some time since the last chilli harvest from my pot plants and these chillies have been ready for a week or two so I've finally decided to pick them and grind them up. The chillies that I had this time were orange habaneros and black pearls. The black pearls turn red when they are ready.

So these were the habaneros:


...and these the black pearls:




The amount of fruit was about the same as last time, but the colours are much move vivid now, the habaneros look awesome!


Something I did different with drying them out this time is instead of using my glass oven, I used the normal house oven set to 90C with the fan forced setting. It took about 10 hours to dry them out to the point of them being grindable.

I used the same trays that my round glass oven has but wrapped them in alfoil.



I used the mortar and pestle again to grind them up.


Compared to the last time, the powder came out a lot paler, but that's due to the colour of the habaneros.


So are they hot? Well habaneros are 300k on the Scoville scale, so I wasn't too tempted to try too much, I had a tiny amount left on my fingers after moving the powder into the container, so I've tried that...and yes they are hot, for such a small amount of powder it burned a little but left me with a runny nose and eyes for a quarter of an hour. They'll definitely add a kick to any curry.

-i