I stumbled upon these beautiful fresh red chillies at the supermarket yesterday. It looked so fresh and alluring, I just had to buy some! I will figure how I’ll use it later, I thought. (Going overboard shopping for groceries is one of my biggest problems. I love having my pantry well stocked, but now it is quite overstocked because I go on buying things and just don’t find enough time to make everything I want). Anyway, getting back to the fresh red chillies – I decided to pickle them.
A while ago a friend had given me a lovely recipe for a stuffed green chilli pickle. So I thought I’ll work with the red chillies on similar lines.
Stuffed red chilli pickle with raw mango:
200g Fresh red chillies
100g raw mango, sliced
100 ml sesame oil or mustard oil (if you like the pronounced flavour)
Aesofetida, a pinch
Stuffing:
1 tbsp Mustard
2 tbsp Fennel seeds
1 tbsp Cumin
1 tbsp Nigella seeds
1 tsp Fenugreek
2 tbsp Dry mango powder (amchur)
3-4 tbsp Salt
2 tsp Turmeric
2 tsp Red chilli powder
Juice of 1 lime
- Wash and dry the chillies.
- With gloves on, trim the stem and deseed the chillies. Reserve the seeds to be used in the stuffing mixture depending on the how hot you’d like your pickle to be.
- Slice the raw mango.
- Mix the stuffing ingredients together along with the reserved seeds
- Fill in each of the chillies with the mixture
- Stir togeter the remaining mixture and the raw mangoes
- Heat the oil. Add a pinch of aesofetida. Pour the hot oil over the pickle.
- Let the flavours meld for a day; after which it’s ready to eat!
What I also did was thrown in the lime wedges too after extracting the juice. If you want to consume it within a few days, a little oil will suffice. Whereas, if you want to use it over some time, you need to increase the oil and keep shaking up the bottle from time to time. Incidentally, the first five ingredients of the stuffing make up the Bengali 5 Spice.
The strong, spicy, salty and sour flavours can spruce up any dish; be it Indian or otherwise.