Best Pickled Jalapenos Recipe

If you grown delicious green jalapeno peppers in your garden you have to try recipe. My hubby Rick makes the best pickled jalapenos recipe! Not only do these taste better than store bought hot pepper rings, but they are easy to make and make a great present to make from your garden.

You might also like these bacon wrapped stuffed jalapenos recipe

Let me first say that this is my husband Rick’s recipe which I think is the best pickled jalapenos recipe. He gives these to family, friends and neighbors and I think they agree since they keep asking for more.

By the way Rick is a garden and travel blogger at Day Tripping with Rick. So if you grow a lot of peppers in your garden check out his blog for more recipes and information as well as Day Trips you might want to take.

Back to these pickled peppers, the brine uses simple spices and is super flavorful and the texture is nothing like those soggy peppers rings you buy at the store. He eats them on a taco, nachos, hot dog, burger and just basically anything Mexican.

They are also a great condiment to have out at summer barbecues. Now let’s have Rick write the rest of this post.

Rick’s easy pickled jalapeno peppers.

I always thought myself a decent cook until I met my wife. Now I’m relegated to the grill/smoker or other manly-men meat-burning device. I leave the heavy lifting to her, and rightly so. She is an excellent cook to which many of you can attest.

But every once in a while, I have my moments. Such a day is today. I’m going to talk to you about cold pickled jalapeno peppers (no canning involved).This method is the easiest way to pickle jalapeno peppers. There is no water bath, sterilizing jars, etc. 

I generally will do this a couple of times in the summer when my pepper plants are neglected after a week at the beach and I’m stuck with 100 or so fully mature chiles.

Unless you are actually operating a Mexican restaurant, you will never use 100 chilies before they shrivel up. So I’m going to show you what you can do with them.

More jalapeno recipes to try.

• easy jalapeno aioli sauce for burgers
• cheese stuffed, bacon wrapped jalapeno peppers in the air fryer
• low carb jalapeno popper waffles
• pineapple jalapeno shrub drink

Frequently asked questions for pickling jalapenos.

Like me, I’m guessing you might have questions so we’ll handle them up front.

Q- What is cold pickling and why would I do this instead of full-bore sterile pickling?

A- Sterile pickling is for the truly hard core. You have to have a big freaking pot to put your canning jars and lids into so you can sterilize them before you can. Your quality assurance policy has to be better than Dow Chemical. After all, when you’re done, the stuff you put up has to last through the Zombie Apocalypse. Your stuff will be the stuff that the radioactive cockroaches, which are the only survivors will be eating.

Cold pickling is easy. Everything you make goes into the fridge and stays there until you eat it. So you tend to eat them pretty quick. The whole process takes about 20 minutes

Q- So, why wouldn’t I just go down to the Dollar General and buy a jar of pickled jalapenos for a buck?

A- Unlike the stuff you get at the store which is picked old, mechanically sliced, cooked to within an inch of edibility, and packed off from parts unknown, you are doing all this yourself. The cold-pickled stuff will be crisper, fresher, better tasting and you’ll be the envy of every Super Bowl party when you pull out a jar of these for your Super Nachos. And you will impress your friends when you give them a jar.

Q- How many peppers do I need?

A- How many pepper do you have? I’ll give you a basic recipe that I use and you just increase or decrease it to fit the number. Today we’ll put up about 3 pints, which is about 40 peppers. I like jalapenos or serrano peppers. Actually a mixture of the two which is bright red and bright green makes a nice gift. For this recipe, they are interchangeable.

Preparing the raw jalapeño peppers.

1. First pick the fresh jalapeno peppers from your garden.
2. Next slice them into thin rings like those pictured below.

Note you might want to put on some plastic disposable gloves when handling hot peppers because they oils from the seeds and ribs will absorb in your skin and if you touch your face or other delicate skin it could really burn.

I like to slice them about ⅛-1/16th inch thick rings. At the end of the day, you have rings, seeds and hats (tops of the peppers). Put the seeds in with the rings. The hats I just pitch.

The cold pickle brine recipe.

This is pretty standard stuff and you probably have everything in your kitchen somewhere. The simple ingredients in the brine are water, white vinegar, white granulated sugar, salt, crushed garlic cloves, oregano and coriander seeds.

Coriander seeds are the most unusual ingredient in this recipe but it definitely adds good flavor and you should be able to find it in the spice aisle of a bigger grocery store. A lot of people add mustard seed to their pickling brine but I like the flavor of coriander seeds much better.

Step 1: Clean and slice the jalapenos into rings and set aside.

Step 2: Throw all the brine ingredients into a large pot and heat oven medium heat until it boils.

Step 3: Here is where my recipe veers a bit from others.  Most will put the peppers into the pot of boiling pickle and let it sit for 10 min or so.  Instead, I pack the pepper rings into the glass jars dry, and pour the hot brine mixture over the peppers.  

I find that by doing it this way the pepper rings stay crisper.

Step 4: Then put on the lids and take them out to the garage fridge.

Note the color changes from the bright green of the raw peppers to a more yellowish green color from the heat of the pickling brine.  

Storage for these pickled peppers are about 3 months in the refrigerator. Keep them as along as you would a jar of pickles you buy at the grocery store. 

Give these pickled jalapeno slices away to your friends who think that the only place you can get food is a store. They will look at you with new respect.

The cold pickle work with all kinds of vegetables. I love to grow bush beans and I tend to get overrun this time of year. I will separate out the straightest ones and make pickled green beans. They make great stirrers for bloody marys.

The nutritional information is for 1 out 12 servings in a pint of jalapenos and using sweetener instead of sugar:
6 cals / 0.1g fat / 6.2g carbs / 5.5g fiber / 0.2g protein = 0.7g net carbs

Rick (click to learn more about Rick.)