Red Pepper Relish

There are a lot of relish recipes in the original Mennonite Community Cookbook, but in the book I’ve included some of my favourites with slight tweaks. This will make a couple small jars of relish. The original recipe is a much larger batch, I imagine for feeding big families. This recipe also reduces the amount of sugar by a lot. So if you want a much sweeter relish, you can use about 1 ½ cups, as per the original recipe, but I find this amount to be sweet enough.  

Ingredients

• 8 sweet red peppers, stems and seeds removed

• ¾ cup white sugar

• 1 cup white vinegar

• 1 tablespoon salt

Directions

• Mince the red peppers any size you like. I use the pulse setting on my food processor. Try not to pulp the peppers. 

• Add minced peppers to a pot with sugar, vinegar and salt. 

• Bring to a boil and then let it simmer until it is really thick and reduced by half. This will take about 90 minutes or more. Once the relish is getting really low on extra liquid, you’ll want to stir frequently to avoid burning the bottom. 

Note

I like a thicker relish, so I usually leave it on until I can no longer see excess liquid. This can take a few hours, so it’s a great thing to put on the stove while you’re doing other chores in the kitchen.