My “World Famous” Jalapeno Poppers

Note that Nathan left on the fridge to remind me

I originally posted this long long ago on my first “Musings Of A Mountain Mama” Blog back in 2006…or was it 2007?  Somewheres during that time anyways, and since then I have had several people ask me for the recipe over the years, so I thought I would do a deluxe recipe post replete with pictures of how I make jalapeno poppers.  We finally got enough jalapenos to make a batch of poppers last night, always around the middle of summer we make tons of poppers and gorge ourselves, it’s a family tradition! 😀

So, to begin, here is the recipe:

1 8oz. bar of cream cheese, room temperature (I have also used fresh homemade chevre with excellent results!)

1 4oz. block of extra sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

1 tsp. onion powder

1/2 tsp. garlic powder

1 tsp. mesquite smoke flavor

1/2 tsp. sea salt (real salt)

freshly ground pepper to taste

Makes about 30 poppers and recipe easily doubles, triples, or quadruples depending on how many jalapenos you have!  (each 1 jalapeno = 2 poppers)

first put all the filling ingredients into a big bowl

then mix it all really well, I like to use a fork to kinda mash it up

pick your jalapenos from the garden

cut them all in half longways

remove the innards (I very much suggest that you wear latex gloves while doing this part, the sting of hot pepper juice is NOT something you wanna mess around with..take it from someone whose learned this the hard way, on more than one occasion 😕 )

now fill all those lovely empty pepper halves with the cheese filling

after that, it’s now time to “bread” them…you will need milk, flour, and plain breadcrumbs (I’ve also used panko bread crumbs before, they make an “extra crunchy” popper..)

dip the stuffed pepper half in the milk the roll in the flour, this works best when you designate a hand to each job…left hand for milk, right hand for flour/breadcrumbs. Otherwise your wet with milk hand will get all gummed up with flour and breadcrumbs and require frequent washings (…again, I have learned this the hard way on more than one occasion…)

after the flour mixture has had about 10-20 minutes to dry, do another layer of flour let dry another 10-20 minutes and then do a layer of breadcrumbs and, for best results, refrigerate for a couple of hours before deep frying…alternatively you can also do ALL of this the day BEFORE you plan to serve them, I often do this when we have guests visiting that way I won’t be stuck in the kitchen all day…they also freeze well (in a single layer on a cookie sheet then packed into gallon sized ziploc bags) and can be deep fried while still frozen…

deep fry at 375F for 3-4 minutes in batches of 3 at a time….I use peanut oil in a cast iron dutch oven with a candy thermometer to help me keep track of the temperature

the finished jalapeno poppers ooozing cheese because I did not refrigerate first and let the filling hard up before frying…no matter, everybody still loved ’em! They disappeared from the plate nearly as fast as I was making them, almost didn’t even get this pic 🙂