It took me until my adult life to appreciate a good jalapeƱo popper and now they are my #1 go-to for a quick-please-the-crowd kind of snack. To me it’s important that a jalapeƱo popper meet four goals to be tasty:
1. The pepper is cooked to bite through easily, but not too soft you can’t pick up
2. It’s creamy, cheesy, and stuffed to the max with a variety of cheeses
3. Bacon
4. This is the most important, it has to still have a jalapeƱo spice kick, but not cause a spicy-cough. This is expected and easy to achieve I promise.
Number 1-3 is in the recipe below.
Number 4, is all about the preparation and is hard to measure because everyone has a different spice level threshold. To get perfect jalapeƱo poppers I have learned to leave in a few seeds when I strip the rib and seeds out, if a couple of seeds stay behind leave them (see photos below). Just remember the more seeds the more spice. Another way to achieve this is to add in pepper jack cheese to the cheese mix – substitute 1/4 cup of cheese in the recipe with shredded pepper jack.
JalapeƱo Poppers
Ingredients
- 5 JalapeƱos – halved
- 2 slices Bacon – cooked and diced
- 4 oz Cream Cheese
- Ā½ cup Sour Cream
- Ā¾ cup Shredded Cheese (Cheddar, Monetary Jack or Pepper Jack)
- Ā¼ tsp Salt
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 425F and line a sheet pan with parchment paper (or foil).
- Slice the JalapeƱos in half lengthwise and remove the rib and seeds. I usually use a 1/4 teaspoon to scrape the rib and seeds out of each pepper. You can leave in seeds to increase the spice level, the more seeds you leave the spicer it will be. Be careful not to touch your eyes or nose!
- Mix together the bacon, cream cheese, sour cream, cheese and salt until combined. You can use a kitchen aid mixer or your spoon-stirring-muscles, it should come together pretty easily.
- Fill the peppers up with the cheese mix. Depending on how big your peppers are, you can get 10-14 peppers filled up. If your peppers are super small you can get more. I stuff my peppers to the max with the cheese filling.
- Place stuffed peppers on your parchment paper and bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes.
Note:
There are a couple different ways to prepare the bacon:
If you want to cook it easy without a mess, place strips of bacon in a single layer on a foil covered baking sheet (make sure the sheet has sides!) bake at 400F for about 20 minutes until crispy.
If you want to WRAP the bacon around the pepper for a different presentation option, you can omit the diced bacon and wrap a single thin strip of bacon around the pepper, trim if necessary. Make sure to keep both ends of the bacon on the bottom of the pepper – hold one end of the bacon on the bottom of the pepper as you wrap is around then press the other end of the bacon on the bottom as well so that when it bakes it holds the wrap.
If you want to omit bacon you can. If you want to substitute it for turkey bacon you can.
