Drying peppers....the lazy way.

I have a crap load of hot peppers. Mostly because a salsa pepper plant was mislabeled as an Italian Roaster plant at the nursery. It was also quite productive. There is no way we could go through the amount of hot peppers that the garden produced. It was a repeat of ZucchiniGate '04. I could put these on the radiator on a cookie sheet, but I can't have them sitting out that long as we have the house on the market and I don't want to deal with them should we have a showing.
Some are still green, and I might roast those. My housemate when I lived in Santa Fe would add roasted green chilies to her chicken soup. It was phenomenal. These two pictures were taken after I took out the red peppers to dry.
The last batch I did about a month ago, I took out the veins and the seeds. I am going to leave them in this time as see what happens in terms of drying. The heat of a hot pepper is in the veins and the seeds, so I already know this will be a much more heated batch. I cut the stems off and cut them in half. I arranged them willy-nilly on my favorite half cookie sheet from my mother in law, cut side up. Putting them in the oven on the lowest setting is what we want. We are trying to mimic the sun naturally drying the peppers.
This is after two hours at about 180 degrees.
After three hours. The edges are curling, the color is deepening and my whole kitchen is starting to smell like roasting peppers, even though we are not roasting.
I took out the small peppers before putting the sheet back in the oven. I don't want to burn them. I am going to let them cool down to check if they are brittle enough. I can always put them back in. What we are looking for is dried, completely, all the way through. We don't want them to mold. That would be bad. Very bad. I have to wait for them to cool completely in order to check that. While they are still warm, they are kind of bendy and leathery. Once they cool, it is a much more accurate check.
This is after four hours.
This is after five hours. Same temperature. I usually set the timer for an hour, just so I don't forget them and end up burning the house down. That would be bad. Very, very bad. I would probably get in trouble for that. I, apparently, am not to be trusted with candles either. I love candles.
These are the few that I took out a while ago, and it is the next day. You can see how they are a little translucent. We like that. Not all are going to be like this, especially if you leave the veins in, as some pepper varieties have thicker, meatier walls than others. I have four different varieties in this batch. I am not a Militant Freakshow about keeping the varieties separate. I don't think I will use even all these, but we have a friend, with whom we smoke meat, who makes his own meat rub mix. I can always get in good with him if I show up with a jar of dried peppers for him to grind into a powder for rubs.
This is after six hours and, again, the next day. On first look, I think they were in too long. But, it is a test and we shall see how they crumble.
These are the few that I left out. They are such a purty color of red. I like putting them in glass jars an putting them up on the shelf with my dried beans and other supplies that are also in glass jars.
I ended up putting a few peppers back into the oven for a couple hours. They were kind of sticky when I went to crush and crumble and I thought they had too much moisture (Ish. Hate that word.) still in them. I got a half jar of crushed red pepper flakes...correction: chunks. I like it chunkier, you can always crush them up into tinier pieces or even put them through a spice mill or coffee grinder to make chili powder. If you use your coffee grinder, run a couple batches of white rice through first to clean out the coffee.