Stocking the pantry this weekend

[chowmama]

I made chile paste last night with equal parts ancho, mulato and pasilla; 1.5 pounds total. Standard technique; stemming and seeding, toasting, soaking and blending. I also food mill to get out the skins and stray seeds, but that's just me. I got 8 cups of paste.

7 are in half-pint canning jars, just about to come out of the pressure canner. (I'll fry the paste just before I use it in a recipe.) Each jar can be assumed to contain roughly 6 chiles.

The 8th cup has been seasoned and augmented and is now combined with ground pork to make six 8-ounce portions of primo chorizo. Five are in the freezer, one in the fridge for tacos this week.

My hands are stained terra cotta and there's a blister where I touched the hot toasting pan. Heating up the paste for the canning jars, a lava bubble exploded all over the wall. The house smells...interesting. I'm pretty sure it's still unsafe to touch my eyes. This is a real pain in the ass, but I sure am feeling good about getting it done.

[CrispyQ]

1. I've never heard of mulato chiles before.

But your chile paste sounds great. We love chiles in our house.

[cilla4progress]

2. Delightful!

[Backseat Driver]

3. Home grown peppers?

Good thankless job but yummmmm...when you say, "I made the chili paste and chorizo myself." I don't can very much because I have to improvise the water bath (no canner) and that's a bit scary. I got a nasty sugar burn long ago following a recipe as a newbie making some some cooked concord jelly for canning. I'll spare you the details.

It sounds as though you've got a good handle on the scoville scale and precautions as well. What material(s) do you use for freezer storage of the meat?

Yesterday I tried some Thai coconut chili soup with chicken but used Penzey's sweet ginger, sweet curry, garlic and very little red pepper flakes. The cilantro and lime were also a dried spice combo along with rainbow chard and green onions. Enjoyed it, but three of us didn't finish all of the 6-8 cups it made...wondering if it will have more or less heat as it sits (last chance for the winter lidded dutch oven garage non-fridge?) or poured in a ziplock, shaped stackable in a plastic Chinese to-go container bottom, for the freezer.

[chowmama]

4. I wish they were homegrown

but I get them from a local market.

The chorizo used not only the chili paste, but a few chipotles in adobo I had around (and some of that sauce) as well as vinegar, a splash of tequila, oregano, cumin, cinnamon and a big bunch of cilantro. I portion it by weight in ziplock sandwich bags and freeze them on a cookie sheet, then pop the frozen bags in a larger freezer container. A nice little box of meat logs. It makes up really fast, once you get the chili paste out of the way.

I've frozen the paste before, but I decided to try canning this time. Couldn't find any instructions for pressure or time, so I just followed instructions for canned mashed pumpkin - it's dense and a low-acid vegetable, so it should work for safety. I'd rather over-process than under.