Barbecue jalapeño poppers

We like to invite friends over for a barbecue party. You should start thinking about the snacks you put on the table to keep your guests happy while you are busy behind the barbecue.

With the jalapeño popper, we have the perfect snack. These stuffed Jalapeño Peppers with bacon are an exquisite blend of creamy cheese, mildly spicy pepper, and salty bacon. It’s complete when finished off with a nice dollop of barbecue sauce.

You can make lots of them in front because we will also tell you how to freeze them so that you always have some fresh poppers in the freezer.

How hot are jalapeño poppers?

That is entirely up to you. If you carefully remove the seeds and glands, they are not that hot. Most of the heat is in the glands that hold the seeds. These are the whiter edges of the flesh inside the pepper.

We use a teaspoon with a slightly sharp edge to scrape the seeds and glands from the jalapeño pepper. If you want the poppers to be a bit hotter, finely chop the seeds and mix them with the cream cheese. If you can’t stand a little heat at all, get a few green candy bell peppers to fill. Just remember where you put them in the grill when you make both.

Besides stuffing the peppers, the only challenge is ensuring they don’t end up under the grates when they’re almost done. The peppers become a lot softer, and they fit more easily between the grate bars. The best way is to lay them perpendicular to the bars. Even better is to use a cake grate to grill them on and transport them.

We place the stuffed peppers on the top two grates of our smoker. This is where the temperature is most constant, so the bacon cooks evenly on all sides.

Be careful not to overcook the jalapeño peppers. The bacon should be a nice golden brown, the cheese should be melted, and the peppers should be slightly softer. If you cook them too far, the peppers will become too soft and turn brown. That just doesn’t look very nice.

We like to brush the jalapeño poppers with a little barbecue sauce when they are almost ready. The sweetness of the sauce completes this snack. The final challenge is that you don’t eat them yourself until your guests know you’ve got them off the grill. Keep in mind that the cheese is piping hot.

How do you freeze jalapeño peppers?

We always make more jalapeno poppers than we think we need. On the one hand, they eat away so quickly that you are always short of them, and if they do remain, we freeze them for the next barbecue party. But how do you do that?

1. Take a cake grate or a baking tray, and place a sheet of baking paper on it.
2. Place the poppers on the baking paper without them touching each other.
3. Let them cool slightly, and then put the entire cake grate in the freezer and leave them there for a whole day.
4. After they’re frozen hard, you put them in a ziplock bag and put them back in the freezer.

This way, you can keep them for at least half a year, but if you remember that they are there, we know they are gone in a couple of weeks. If you want to reheat them, put them in the oven at 200ºC for 20 to 25 minutes until the bacon is golden brown again.

These jalapeño poppers are the perfect snack for your next barbecue party. If you will make them, let us know in a comment below. Or better! Please take a photo and post it on Instagram. Tag @bbqhelden so we can see what it looks like.