Kitchen Garden Forum

What is the opinion on the shelf life of dried chillies?I still have some in a jar which my wife dried about four years ago.They appear to be ok but a not very appetising brownish colour.I want to bin them and replace with the ones I've grown this year but my wife says to use them fresh and use the dried ones when the fresh ones are used up.

Hi Snooky, not sure myself, but you could take a peek at some supermarket dried chillies to see when packaged and sell by date to see what the food industry reccomends, that might settle it.

Shoudn't have thought you would come to any harm if they were well dried. As for colour, I find that the colour stays OK if kept in a cupboard out of the light.

I normally grow fresh each year, and turn any left over dried chillies from previous years into chilli powder. If it is really sad I'd use it to keep the squirrels off of the bird feeders !

Hi snooky, I agree with your wife about using your chillies fresh, rather than drying them.

However unless you're really averse to using ones bought from the shop, they're so cheap I can't see it makes sense to eek out ones from four years ago that will definitely have lost some flavour & heat by now.

Finally, if you have a glut of fresh chillies, remember that they freeze well and are easier to use straight from the freezer (you can chop them up whilst still frozen, so minimising the chance of juice getting on your fingers, eyes etc).

I recently came across some chillies in a jar which I must have dried about 3 or 4 years ago as in more recent years I've been freezing them. They were pretty shrivelled and brown when I tasted them they seemed to have lost most of their bite, so I binned them. I don't think the darkened colour matters if they still have some heat but as with all dried vegetables and herbs, they do lose their flavour after a while and are probably then not worth keeping. If you've got plenty of fresh ones, I'd be inclined to use them.

This year we've turned most of our chillies into Sweet & Sour chilli sauce and just use a dollop of it whenever we want to add some heat to our food, which avoids the risk of chopping them up and accidentally rubbing your eye afterwards with disastrous consequences.

To keep their colour, I am going to try Delia's chilli sherry, and some vodka
chilli.
4 - 8 chillies halved,( leave seeds if you like it vindaloo ) to a bottle of dry fino sherry - that should give any casserole a kick lol
and the chilli vodka and orange as a drink - great if you like it hot !

Thanks everyone for your input,going down the freezing route and binning the old dried chillies.