Homemade Roasted Peppers

Roasted Red Peppers

How to roast peppers:

  1. Set oven to broil. While the oven is preheating, line a half-sheet pan with aluminum foil. Wash bell peppers. (I use the red ones almost exclusively, but every now and again I will use a yellow bell pepper. The orange and green ones really don't do it for me.) Leave their stems on; you'll use them as little handles to rotate the peppers later in the roasting process.

  2. Place the peppers on the sheet, leaving only a little space between them. Place the sheet in the oven. Every 10-15 minutes, open the oven and, working quickly, turn the peppers using their stems, so that they aren't lying on the same side throughout the whole roasting period. Each time you move the peppers their skin should look past wrinkled and blistered and should be starting to turn brown/black and puffing up in spots. Try to make sure that the peppers rotate evenly throughout the process… they should be evenly darkened and collapsing in on themselves a bit when you take them out of the oven. This total process takes 45 minutes to 1 hour.

  3. Place the sheet on a cooling rack and let the peppers cool. Take it from me… don't try and peel those bad boys right when they come out of the oven because they are VERY HOT! Take the aluminum foil that they are on top of and wrap it around the peppers. This makes peeling the skins off much easier because they are sitting in steam. When the peppers have cooled for about 30 minutes, then you can start to peel them. The peel should pretty much slip right off, but the peppers themselves will be quite slippery, making this a little bit of a messy job, so you'll need to do this over the aluminum foil that they are sitting in. I peel off large sections at a time while dumping out any of the interior liquid and, of course, ridding the peppers of all their seeds. Have a clean plate ready for the cleaned, peeled pepper segments.

  4. Cut them into strips and place them on the plate. If you have extra peppers, keep them in a tupperware with some olive oil and a sliced clove of garlic to have as a little snack throughout the week!