Pickled Pepper Poppers – as Easy to Eat as They Are Hard to Say

This is a combination of opinion, memoirs, a kick-butt recipe and our experiences in the kitchen. Click here to jump right to the Pickled Pepper Poppers recipe.

Old family recipes that have been sitting dusty on the shelves of memory should not just be resurrected, but updated. We can bring to bear all the knowledge gained from our years of cooking, eating, enjoying and experimenting to these cherished taste memories, and form them into something new and fresh that honors the past while reflecting today’s palates, ingredients and preferences. Old recipes are family treasures to be passed from generation to generation, but we add our own imprint in the process, treating them not as static formulas to be replicated with military precision, but as evolving heirlooms that take on the DNA and wisdom of each one who touches them and makes them their own way.

This post is about one of those recipes, a dish my Mom used to make that was included in the cookbook she and my Dad collaborated on for his real estate business as a giveaway.

Rather than repeating the story of that cookbook, which is one of my most cherished possessions and something I would DEFINITELY take with me if I had to leave in a hurry for a fire or a hurricane, you can read all about it here in the post below from late 2017.

Antipasto Advice from Mom and Great Tastes from the Texas Coast

Here’s Mom’s recipe for what we’re now calling Pickled Pepper Poppers, taken from their cookbook. It always makes me smile when I see her recipes in the cookbook, because of her total lack of specificity. It’s easy for me to ‘read her mind’ but a layperson who didn’t grow up cooking with her could struggle a bit to make something from this recipe.

My sister and I collaborated in the test kitchen here at Glover Gardens yesterday to recreate this recipe, modernize it to fit our current palates and add the missing specificity to the ingredients and amounts. We did it – and ourselves – justice.

We were so happy with our creation, a dish that honored Mom’s original idea but brought some added brightness from the lime juice and more piquant heat from the seeds and ribs of the pickled jalapeños, along with the carrots. This version is a keeper, my friends!

Pickled Pepper Poppers Recipe

Cooking time: 20 minutes; serves 4-6 as an appetizer

Ingredients

For the Peppers and Plating

• One large can (27 oz.) whole jalapeños (pickled in brine)
• 4 sprigs cilantro, chopped, for plating
• Handful of spinach, arugula or other greens (optional)
• 4-6 grape tomatoes, halved, for plating (optional)

Filling

• 8 oz. package of cream cheese or reduced fat cream cheese, softened to room temperature
• ½ bunch of cilantro, washed, about ½ cup, tightly packed
• 3 cloves garlic, peeled
• One jalapeño from the can, whole, with the stem cut off, and all carrot slices (see note)
• Juice of ½ lime, about 1 tbsp (don’t worry if it’s a little more or less)
• ¼ tsp Tabasco or your favorite hot sauce
• ¼ tsp Zippy Southwest or your favorite southwest seasoning (optional; just add more salt if you don’t use this)
• Reserved ribs and seeds from jalapeños (optional, to make it more spicy; we used 1 tbsp)
• More salt as necessary (we added up to ½ tsp)

Cooking Instructions

Slice all but one of the peppers in half long-wise, leaving the stem attached and scrape out the seeds and ribs with a spoon. Pat them dry. Reserve the seeds and ribs. Slice the stem off of the top of the reserved pepper.

To make the filling, add the cream cheese, cilantro, garlic, reserved pepper with the stem removed, lime juice, Tabasco, Zippy or other southwest seasoning to a food processor and process until smooth. Taste and add salt if necessary and up to 1 tbsp of the reserved jalapeño ribs and seeds if you’d like it to be more spicy, processing again until well-blended.

Arrange the pickled jalapeño halves on your serving platter of choice, atop the spinach, arugula or other greens, if you are using them. Spoon the filling mixture from the food processor into a plastic food storage bag or piping tool. If you are using a food storage bag, twist it slightly above the filling to make an airtight section you can press, then cut a small hole in the bottom of the bag so that you can pipe the filling onto the jalapeños. Fill each one, then refrigerate for at least 15 minutes before serving.

To serve, sprinkle with the chopped cilantro, and garnish with the grape tomatoes.

Notes

• The filling is amazing! It’s a recipe on its own and is a fabulous spread that can be used in numerous ways – like filling hollowed-out cherry tomatoes, spreading on water crackers or using as a condiment on a panini or sandwich.
• The recipes amounts match the yield of the filling to the number of jalapeños, but you can use less than the whole can of jalapeños if you want a smaller appetizer and will have some of the spread left for other purposes. For this test kitchen version, we only used 8 of the 12 jalapeños in the can.
• Be sure to get canned peppers that include carrots. They add a great deal to the flavor, as we learned while we were creating this updated version of Mom’s recipe.

Join Us in the Kitchen

We were delighted with the results, and Mom would have been, too. We transformed her heirloom recipe into one of our own.

Update

We revisited this wonderful dish in November of 2025, at a Day of the Dead dinner in which we honored Mom, my brother and my Dad. It brought back the memories while helping us make new ones.

Let us know if you make this! It comes together quickly and is surprising sophisticated considering the simple ingredients.

© 2024 and 2025, Glover Gardens