Zero Waste: Making Red Chili Powder

Dear Planeteers,

We were growing different varieties of chillies from couple of years, but this year is little different. With the help of my co-worker, I found out that we can grow chillies from the same plant for multiple years. So I gave extra care during the winters to protect them. Luckily we could keep 3 plants in an excellent state from last year and got a very good harvest of green chillies this year so far. Now we have enough of green chillies and few left them to turn red chillies on the plant. We started wondering what we should do with these red chilies!! 

We let the chillies turn red on the plants and harvested them once they are red and ripen. 1st red chili harvest I kept for seeds and 2nd harvest I decided to make Red Chili powder for our cooking. We dry them in Oven as we are close to winter now (even before winter started we had #californiawildfire which caused ash fall and low sunny days) this is not a conventional method but works good to dry the chilis. Then using Mixer Grinder we powdered dried chillies and made chili powder. If you are living in sunny area, I highly recommend doing try drying Red Chili in open air under sun. This is the best environmental safe way to make a difference. 

If you are in northern atmosphere we you are in colder or less sunny area, then use Oven method to dry them. Put the chilies on a try as displayed in picture and put them on Oven. Turn on Oven to Bake mode and set the temperature to 85°C to 95°C let the temperature gradually increase and keep the oven door a little open so that moisture can go out. Keep checking on Red Chili to optimally use the Oven to make sure you are not over drying them. You can enjoy nice aromatic flavor out of the oven while the chilis are getting dried. Red chilies needs to be dry enough to powder them don’t let them over burn. 

Final product is really amazing, that gives us a big motivation to make red chili powder on a regular basis. Now we are confident that we are getting best of the best Red Chili powder for our cooking.  

Here is the picture of final product which is weighing 1 lb (450 gms) 

What is the impact we created: 

• We learnt how to make Red Chili Powder at home.This helps in reducing trips to Grocery store, which again imports chili powder from different parts of the world. This is all going to cause a lot of carbon emission into atmosphere. We are at least able to reduce our portion of carbon addition to atmosphere. Not only that, We are publishing this post to educate others to make it possible to create their part of positive impact. 
• No plastic bag pollution. 
• Less Carbon emission. 
• Less or negligible amount of waste (We composted Calix and Pedicle rest of the chili made powder)
• We made what we can consume (not creating extra to reduce the waste).