New Recipe! Confetti Pepper Jelly

Dear Friends, you know we like our condiments and you know we like it spicy. So it was only a matter of time before I conquered pepper jelly. I was inspired by some fine-looking peppers from our local farmer’s market.

My recipe is simple and straightforward, allowing you to control the heat with the ratio of hot peppers to mild peppers. 🌶️ 🫑 It’s imperative to use multicolored peppers for the beautiful confetti look.

Note: like Justin Wilson’s recipe, this one assumes that you are already skilled in the water bath canning process and does not provide detailed instructions or a tutorial. If you have never done canning before, take time to learn the process before diving into the recipe. I’ve added a how-to link into the recipe. But don’t be daunted by the long instructions; it’s actually pretty easy.

Confetti Pepper Jelly Recipe

Yield: ~6 cups; Cooking Time: 1 hour

Ingredients

• 1½ cups total minced peppers in different colors, seeded, ribs removed and very finely diced; use more sweet peppers than hot for a milder pepper jelly; go half ‘n’ half for a spicier version
  • ¾ to 1 cup minced sweet peppers, such as bell or mini-peppers
  • ½ to ¾ cup minced hot peppers, such as jalapeno, serrano, habanero, or other hot peppers
• ½ to 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 1¾ cups cider vinegar
• 6 cups sugar
• 6 ounces liquid pectin

Cooking Instructions

Prepare your water bath canning pot, rack, lifting tool and sterilized jars and lids (enough for ~6 cups of jelly). Here is a good set of instructions, from the Ball Canning Company.

Place the 1½ cups finely minced peppers in a medium saucepan with the red pepper flakes, vinegar and sugar, and cook over medium-high heat, stirring frequently, bringing to a boil. Watch it the whole time so that it doesn’t surprise you by boiling over. Once it comes to a boil, keep it at a rolling boil and stir constantly for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the pectin.

Using a wide-mouth funnel, pour the hot jelly into sterilized jars and seal with sterilized new lids, then follow the manufacturer’s instructions for water bath canning, with a ten minute boil time.

In Pictures

These are the peppers I used, although I didn’t need all of them. They are sweet mini bell peppers (the larger red ones), jalapenos, serranos, habaneros, red habaneros, and sugar rush peach peppers.

The Backstory: A Kitchen Disaster Smoked Us Out!

You probably haven’t notices that my pictures of the cooking process above have a time gap.

There was a culinary catastrophe with my pot of homemade pepper jelly while I was waiting for its contents to boil. I turned away for just a moment, and suddenly, it morphed into a bubbling volcano that boiled over onto the glass-topped stove. Seriously, I turned away for the amount of time it takes to sneeze or check the TCM Classic Movies schedule. 😳

The small amount of my confetti-colored, sugary, chile-peppery goodness that erupted over the edge before I rescued the pot scorched immediately into a crusty, black, ashen mess that emitted a ghastly, acrid smoke. It filled the air with a pungent choking miasma that rendered our Gumbo Cove kitchen and living area completely uninhabitable—a true NO-GO Zone—for more than 15 minutes. We had to open all the French doors and all the windows, and wait until it was safe to re-enter.

Sigh.

It was a setback, but I persevered, and that made the eventual pepper jelly success all the sweeter (pun intended). I picked up where I left off, and the only casualty was that the jelly-to-pectin ratio was a bit lower than it should have been, given the boiled-over amount that was missing, and my delicious jelly is a bit thick and chunky rather than smooth and runny.

So when I noted in the recipe above, “Watch it the whole time so that it doesn’t surprise you by boiling over,” you know that I really, really mean it.

Since I didn’t have a picture, I asked a GenAI app to make one for me, but nothing came anywhere near the black burned-on smudge that took us two days to eradicate from the stove’s glass top. I used it anyway, just for fun.

Our real glass-topped stove burnt-on black char wasn’t at all colorful or attractive. But it makes me smile, now that it has been a couple of weeks since we scrubbed and scraped and applied various chemical treatments to get our cooktop back to normal.

Confetti Pepper Jelly is The Bomb

I was inordinately proud of this jelly! I have always been reticent to try canning but was happy to realize that I could master the process. When the jars did that little ‘pop’, the telltale sign that the seal was made as they cooled, and when I have to use a tool to pry the lids off, I know that it’s been done properly and I feel like the master of the kitchen.

Taste-wise, the jelly I created based on Justin Wilson’s recipe – with my own adjustments – wasn’t as spicy as I intended. But interestingly, even the spice hounds in my family felt that it was just right, in the finest Goldilocks sense. My son, who is my Spice Partner in Crime, said, “I know this sounds weird, Mom, but if it was any spicier it would compete with whatever you’re putting it on. It’s perfect just like it is.”

What DO you put it on? Well, if you’re from the South, you already know that cream cheese is the gold standard for pepper jelly. Southern Living magazine says so in its article, The Best Appetizer Starts With A Block Of Cream Cheese And Jar Of Pepper Jelly, Says Every Southern Grandmother Ever.

We served it that way at Thanksgiving.

We had it on a different appetizer platter at Gumbo Cove. It was really good with brie on a green apple.

Whatever we eat dockside is awesome.

Make this jelly, my friends – you won’t regret it!

© 2024, Glover Gardens