Pickled Bell Peppers

Pickled bell peppers turn an end of season pepper glut into sweet and tangy strips that you can pull off the pantry shelf all winter, and a batch comes together in about an hour of hands on time. They land somewhere between a bread and butter pickle and a marinated antipasto pepper, which means they go on sandwiches, into grain bowls, and straight onto a cheese board right from the jar.

This recipe comes straight from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, and it’s published in the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning. The pickling liquid is the standard 1:1 vinegar to water ratio, with sugar boiled in to round out the sharpness, so it tastes closer to the sweet pepper strips you buy in a jar at the deli counter than to anything you would call a dill pickle.

Its similar to my other pepper pickling recipes, like marinated peppers and pickled banana peppers, though the sugar here makes it noticeably sweeter than either one.

If you want more peppers put up while you have the canner out, the pepper canning recipes roundup has the rest of what I make each fall.

Choosing Bell Peppers

Look for peppers with thick walls, taut skin, and no soft spots, because a pepper that has started to wrinkle at the shoulders will collapse in the jar. Any color works and the recipe does not care which you pick, so green, red, yellow, orange, and purple bells can all go into the same batch.

Red and orange peppers are fully ripe and taste sweeter, while green peppers hold their shape a little better and keep a grassier, sharper edge that stands up to the sugar in the syrup.

Blocky, boxy peppers are easier to cut into even strips than the long tapered ones, though tapered peppers work perfectly well if that is what the garden gave you. Use them within a day or two of picking if you can, and store them in the crisper drawer rather than on the counter in the meantime.

Trim away any blemishes or bruised patches as you cut, since those spots turn mushy during processing and there is no reason to put them in a jar you plan to keep for a year.

Ingredients for Pickled Bell Peppers

This is a short ingredient list, and every item on it is doing a specific job. The exact amounts live in the recipe card at the bottom of the post, but here is what each one contributes and where you have room to make changes.

• Bell Peppers: Firm, fresh peppers with thick walls, any color, cored and seeded and cut into strips. Weigh them after trimming if you can, since stems and cores add up.
• Vinegar: White or apple cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity. The acidity is what makes these safe to can, so use the full amount and never dilute it with extra water. White vinegar keeps the pepper colors cleaner, while cider vinegar adds a mellow, fruity note and tints the syrup slightly.
• Sugar: Plain granulated sugar, boiled into the vinegar and water. It balances the acid and gives the syrup body. Sugar is optional, and is not the safety control in this recipe, but the ratio was tested as written and it is what makes these taste the way they do.
• Pickling Salt: Use pickling or canning salt, not table salt, since iodine and anti caking agents cloud the syrup and dull the pepper color. It goes into the jars rather than into the pot.
• Garlic: Fresh cloves, divided among the jars. Garlic is a flavoring here and you can leave it out based on your tastes.
• Pickle Crisp: Optional. Calcium chloride firms up the pepper strips without affecting the acidity or the process time.

Have the garlic peeled and the salt measured out before the syrup goes on the stove, because the peppers only spend a minute or two in the boiling liquid and you want to be filling jars, not hunting for a teaspoon.

If you like a little more going on in the jar, a pinch of pickling spice or a few peppercorns per jar is a safe addition, since dry spices in small amounts do not change the acidity of the pickling liquid.

How to Make Pickled Bell Peppers

The whole process runs in three parts. You cut the peppers and get jars waiting, you boil the pickling syrup and give the peppers a quick blanch in it, and then you pack, fill, and process. Read through once before you start, because the peppers move from pot to jar quickly and the syrup should still be boiling hot when it goes in.

Everything below is written for the full seven pound batch, which fills about nine pints. Halving the recipe works without any change to the process time or the headspace, and so does doubling it if you have the counter space and a big enough pot for the syrup.

Prepare the Peppers

Wash 7 pounds of bell peppers and cut each one into quarters. Pull out the core and seeds, cut away any blemishes, and slice the quarters lengthwise into strips roughly half an inch to an inch wide.

A mandoline slicer speeds this up if you have one, though a sharp knife is perfectly adequate and gives you more control over strip thickness. Peel 9 cloves of garlic and measure out 4 1/2 teaspoons of pickling salt so both are ready to go into the jars.

Make the Pickling Syrup

Combine 3 1/2 cups of sugar, 3 cups of 5 percent vinegar, and 3 cups of water in a large non reactive pot and bring it to a boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Let it boil for a full minute. Stainless steel or enameled cast iron both work here, while bare aluminum or copper will react with the vinegar and give the syrup a metallic taste.

Add all the pepper strips to the boiling syrup and bring the pot back up to a boil. This happens fast, since the peppers release water as soon as they hit the hot liquid, and you want to catch it right as it returns to a boil rather than letting the peppers simmer away.

They should still have some resistance when you lift a strip out with a spoon.

Pack and Fill the Jars

Put half a clove of garlic and 1/4 teaspoon of pickling salt into each half pint jar, or a full clove and 1/2 teaspoon into each pint. Add Pickle Crisp now if you are using it, at 1/8 teaspoon per pint or 1/16th for a half pint.

Pack the hot pepper strips in on top, standing them upright so they slide in tightly, then ladle the boiling syrup over them through a canning funnel to leave 1/2 inch of headspace.

Run a bubble tool or a chopstick down the sides of the jar to release trapped air, then check the headspace again and top up with more syrup if it dropped. Every strip needs to be under the liquid. Wipe each rim with a clean damp cloth, center the lid, and screw the band down fingertip tight, which means snug but not cranked.

Canning Pickled Bell Peppers

You can skip the canner entirely and keep the filled jars in the refrigerator, where they will hold for about a month or two and stay crisper than the processed version. Water bath processing is what makes them shelf stable, and it is what lets you open a jar of summer peppers in February.

Lower the filled jars into the simmering water bath canner using a jar lifter, making sure they are covered by at least an inch of water. Bring the canner to a full rolling boil before you start the timer, since the process time only begins once the water is genuinely boiling.

Process half pints or pints for 10 minutes, adjusting for altitude using the table below. Turn off the heat, remove the canner lid, and let the jars sit 5 minutes before you lift them out onto a towel. Leave them undisturbed for 12 to 24 hours, then check the seals, label the jars, and tuck them away.

Give them two weeks before opening so the syrup has time to penetrate the strips. This is one of the quicker water bath canning recipes once the peppers are cut.

Tips for Crisp Pickled Peppers

Texture starts at the cutting board. Thick walled peppers picked within a day or two hold up far better than ones that have been sitting in the crisper for a week, and strips cut about half an inch wide keep some body where thin ribbons go slack. Cut away every soft or bruised patch, because those spots are already breaking down and they will not improve in a hot jar.

The other lever is heat. The peppers only need to come back to a boil in the syrup, not cook in it, and the canner timer starts when the water boils rather than when the jars go in. Adding Pickle Crisp at 1/8 teaspoon per pint firms the strips noticeably and it does not touch the acidity, so it is a safe addition to a tested recipe. Skip the old lime and alum soaks, which this method does not need.

Ways to Use Pickled Bell Peppers

These go on sandwiches first in my house, layered into anything with melted cheese, and they do the same job on a burger that a pickled banana pepper does at a pizza place. Drained and chopped, they fold into tuna salad, egg salad, and potato salad, and they turn a plain pot of beans into something with a little edge to it. A jar on an antipasto board next to olives and hard cheese does not need any help from you.

Do not throw out the syrup when the peppers are gone. It makes a decent base for a salad dressing whisked with olive oil and a spoonful of mustard, and it deglazes a pan of sausage or pork chops nicely. Just do not reuse it to can another batch of pickles, since the peppers have already diluted it and there is no way to know where how acidic the brine ended up after pickling the first batch.

Chopped fine, and that’ll give you something closer to pepper onion relish if you want something for hot dogs.

A few questions come up every year when I write about pickling peppers, so here are the ones I hear most often.

Pickled Bell Peppers FAQs

If the pepper harvest keeps coming, here are more vegetable pickles worth putting up while the canner is already out.

Vegetable Pickling

Pickled Dilly Beans (Dill Pickled Green Beans)

Pickled Banana Peppers

Canning Sauerkraut

And if you are new to putting up pickles, these are the recipes I would start with.

Pickling

Sweet Gherkin Pickles

Canning Three Bean Salad

Old Fashioned Cucumber Lime Pickles (with Pickling Lime)