Homemade Chipotle Peppers on the Kamado Joe

Today we’re making our homemade chipotle peppers.

Making chipotle peppers is real easy to do. All you need a big bowl full of jalapeno peppers. Red or green will do.

Our day started with thoughts of smoked baby back ribs on our Kamado Joe. We decided to fill the rest of the grill grate with some jalapeno peppers.

You don’t need a ceramic grill and smoker to make these homemade chipotle peppers. Your charcoal, pellet, or gas grill will do just fine.

So let’s get started …

Homemade Chipotle Peppers

Chipotle peppers are basically jalapeno chili peppers, red or green, that have been wood-smoked and dried.

You can also pick up chipotle peppers at your local grocer, typically sold canned in a rich and smokey flavored adobo sauce. In a later post, we’ll talk about making that adobo sauce. Good stuff I say, but our homemade chipotle peppers are much better … and much cheaper.

So, while we’re smoking up a rack of baby back ribs using our 3-2-1 method, a meal for two, we’re going to fill in the grill grate gaps with jalapeno peppers. Check out our earlier Kamado Joe baby back ribs post here.

Leave plenty of air gap for that no-calorie wood-smoke flavor to circulate over and around your ribs and peppers. Don’t choke off the smoke flavor.

So let’s make some.

Supplies for Making Smoked Jalapeno Peppers

grilling tongs
barbecue towels
smoking wood of choice, we’re using cherry today
food dehydrator

You can check out our barbecue towel review here, and our food dehydrator reviews here.

We’re saving our pennies to purchase a home freeze-dryer. Freeze dried chipotle peppers are on the short list of things to try when we eventually get one.

Ingredients for Making Chipotle Peppers

red or green jalapeno peppers

As many jalapeno peppers as you can fit on your grill grate while leaving room the wood smoke to circulate. Both red or green are fine. Pick through that pile of produce to get only the perfect peppers.

Cold-weather and winter-time grocery store selections are not always optimal for warm weather produce. Sometime you get what you get. Run with it.

Here we’ve got a dozen big beefy jalapeno peppers. We probably could have squeezed in a couple more. As you can see, we left the stems on the peppers.

How to Make Chipotle Peppers

We have stabilized our Kamado Joe at 250 °F / 121 °C as we whip up some of our 3-2-1 style baby back ribs.

Making chipotle peppers is easy. Just let the jalapeno peppers sit in the smoke bath during that first three-hour step.

If you’re not multi-tasking and just smoking the jalapeno peppers, three to four hours in a good smoke bath is fine.

After three hours, remove the smoked jalapeno peppers from the grill grate. They should be all smoked, softened, and wrinkly.

Today we’re loading up our food dehydrator to preserve our food smoking efforts. Optionally, these smoked and softened jalapeno peppers would be the primary ingredient into our upcoming adobo sauce recipe. Stay tuned.

In your food dehydrator, layer the smoked and softened jalapeno peppers on to the dryer trays.

We set our food dehydrator at 125 °F / 52 °C degrees. Dry until your smoked chipotle peppers for about ten hours to start.

At ten or so hours, turn off your food dehydrator and let the peppers cool. Warm peppers will still be pliable.

Once the chipotle peppers are cool, they should be firm and hard to the touch and not in any way soft and pliable. If not, fire of the food dehydrator for another five or so hours of run time.

We have found it takes the smoked and softened jalapeno peppers about fifteen hours to completely dry in our food dehydrator so they are dry, hard, and feel brittle when cooled. Your mileage may vary.

Smoked Pepper Storage

We really like to add a bit of smoky heat to our day eats.

Homemade chipotle peppers are a kitchen and outdoor cooking necessity. So we’ll stuff our wood-smoked and dried jalapeno peppers into zip-top bags for storage and easy access.

Just a few peppers into one zip-top bag to keep out moisture from repeated opening and closings.

Properly packaged and dried, these homemade chipotle peppers will last months in your pantry. If they hang around that long.

How to Use Your Homemade Chipotle Peppers

We can hand-crush our homemade chipotle peppers to flavorize nearly any dish as your cooking, indoors or outside on the grill.

Optionally, we can crumble one or two into a non-reactive container and add a bit of water, your favorite beer, spirit, or other cooking liquid to soften and hydrate. In a few minutes, the smoked jalapeno pepper has hydrated just enough to fold into the daily-eats for some added no-calorie smoky heat flavoring.

Some of our personal favorites to add a bit of smoky chipotle heat are baked beans, any Mexican dish we might make, tomato sauces, basting sauces, the list just goes on and on.

Of course, any of our barbecue sauces we make or when doctoring up store bought.

Later we will talk about making our own homemade chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. So stay tuned.