Lieutenant Tom Papoutsis is back. We’re cooking chili, Firehouse Chili. How many alarms do we want to do today? We want to go two, three, how many do we want? Three-alarm, we’re going three-alarm chili from the back. If we’re doing one-alarm chili, two-alarm chili, I’m going to use a jalape?o. Jalape?o is probably the most common, this little guy right here is a little sherry pepper. These are great, take these, cut them, stuff them with some Fontina cheese and some prosciutto-wrapped and soak them in oil, fantastic. Not a good cherry pepper. Jalape?o and this little guy here, this little killer is called a Habanero. We’re probably going to go three, four alarms on this chili. These guys are going to get heated up today. All right, so we’re going to use our jalape?o and I’m going ahead and use this Habanero. We don’t need a whole lot, although we’re making a lot of chili, we don’t want to use a whole lot, because then, it will be inedible.
So what we’re going to do is we’re going to start out. I want to take the cap off, I’m going to set the cap aside and I’m going to split, I’m going ahead to split my jalape?o right down the middle. Now, here’s is the important part. If you’ll look at the jalape?o, we’ve got the seeds. Everybody says the seeds are where the heat is, that’s not true. This web right here, you see this white part, this thin piece right here, this is where the heat is. If you do not want, you want the flavor of the pepper but you don’t want all the heat, then you’re going to take this portion out. To do that, what we can do, is just basically peel it out. We’re going to take seeds and all and then you can take you’re knife. Actually I’m going to go ahead and split this because it’s going to make it a little easier. Get the seeds out of there and then you can actually take your knife and just cut it. Just cut it right out of there. Just like that, watch your fingers. There we go, okay and we’ll give it a scrape. There, a lot of that heat is there, not in here. So that’s how we’re going to keep our chili so that it’s not super hot, because all of the heat in the pepper. Remember, most of the heat is in this white web material on the inside.
Same holds true for the Habanero. When we do the Habanero, we’re going to cut the cap off the same way and if you want to, you can actually trim that back and I can take and just pull that off of there, there we go. We’re going to use that, same holds true for this. If you want to, take your finger, pop your finger in there and pull the seeds out. Just like that. There’s not whole lot of web in there. I’m going to cut this open and let you see it. You can see here in what I’ve pulled out. This little bit of red is what we were talking about here with the jalape?o. But if you cut this open, you don’t have near as much as what you did in the jalape?o as you do in the Habanero. But remember, this is the hotter of the two so we’re only going to use one of those. It’s going to be hot, but what I’ll do is I’m going ahead and strip this thing down and we’re going to do this for both of them. We’re just going to chop this the same way that we did with all of the other peppers. So we’ll just go ahead and chop this up, get them into little pieces. This one’s giving me a little bit of a hard time but that’s all right.
Now, the biggest thing is, once you do this, and you can see I’m not wearing gloves. If I was a smart man, like what we got there out in the medic unit, I’ve already got myself a pair of gloves and we’d be okay. But I didn’t do that so the big thing is, do not touch your eyes. Don’t touch your mucus membranes. If you have any cuts on your hands, it’s going to hurt. So if there’s any question, wear a pair of gloves. Wear some type of barrier to keep between the pepper and your hands or your skin. But absolutely, positively, don’t touch your eyes after you do that.
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