4 Hot Tricks for Handling Chile Peppers

If you’re like us, you strive for greatness—and, incidentally, immaculate rings of jalapenos to garnish your tower of nachos. We’ve found the best way to fix ‘em up. Cut off the stem end of a jalapeno with a knife, then insert a vegetable peeler into the chile. Using a circular motion, core the pepper and pull out the ribs and seeds. Shake any remaining seeds out of the chile, then slice it into rings.

You can store peppers in the freezer, so you might as well stock up to create a little mix-and-match pepper patch in your kitchen. Instead of running out to the store every time you need a single kind of this or that pepper, buy large bags of peppers and freeze them. When a chopped or minced pepper is needed for a recipe, take it straight from the freezer to a cutting board.

Chipotle peppers or pickled jalapeno chiles are a great way to season dips and sauces, but mincing them is tedious work. But lo! An ingenious solution looms. Put down your knife and simply put a small amount of chile into the well of a garlic press and squeeze. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

It’s always a good idea to protect your fingers (and whatever they’ll touch later) when preparing fresh chiles, and the general advice is to wear latex or plastic gloves. However, if you find yourself gloveless, turn a zipper-lock bag inside out to create one on the spot. (It’s helpful to secure the bag with a rubber band around your wrist.) The bag can then be turned right-side out to store leftover chiles.