Grind Your Own Cayenne Peppers

What do you do on a cold rainy day in the late winter when you can't go outside?  This is the question I asked myself recently when faced with this situation.  There were a multitude of things I COULD do .... dust furniture, mop the kitchen, clean out a closet ... the list goes on. Well, I wasn't in the MOOD to do any of those things.  Then, I looked across the kitchen and saw a basket of cayenne peppers that I dried last fall.  I even wrote a blog entry about how I dried them.

How to Dry Cayenne Peppers

Well, now was the time to do something with them, I decided.  I wanted to make a powder out of them, like you buy in the spice section of the supermarket.  The first step was to get the seeds out of the peppers because you only want to process the red skin.  Just break the stem end of the pepper off.  Most of the seeds are located in the stem end.

Now, tear the rest of the pepper into pieces and remove any more seeds you find.  Did I mention you might want to wear rubber gloves for this step?  

Next, load the pieces into the "spice" grinder which is really just a coffee bean grinder.  

And grind away!

This is what it should look like when finished.  

Pour into an empty spice jar you have saved from store-bought spices.

And there you have it, your own home-grown, home-made Cayenne pepper spice!