You guys are the best!
I went ahead and tried this:
I cut about eight jalapenos into quarters long-ways. I removed the seeds and most of the membranes. I then placed the jalapeno strips face down on a rack and put that on the next-to-top shelf/rack of my old MES-40. I used a mixture of pellets in an AMAZN pellet maze thing. The maze already had those pellets in it, left over from a previous run. It was a bit over 1/3 full.
(At the end of a run, if the maze still has enough unburned pellets to be worth saving, I usually put the still burning maze into one of those half-size disposable aluminum foil steam table pans they sell at Sam's club, and put the foil lid on it tightly-sealed to snuff them out for later use. So this partially used maze of pellets was there in the smoker waiting to be used).
I ran it cold for about an hour, and then was reading some recipes where people ran their jalapenos for 24 hours at 180 degrees to fully dry them. So I turned on the heat and ran it at 180 for another three hours.
The pellets were finished burning by then, so I took the peppers out at that point.
They weren't dry, but sort of floppy, and they were easy to put into the bottle of tequila. So they're now soaking in it.
I'll let you know how it turns out.
I like the idea of smoking and drying a batch of jalapenos and then powdering them for all sorts of uses. I've got a freeze dryer, and maybe you could smoke them and then dry them in that. Then again just running them to dryness in the smoker might be better.
Who knows? Lots of potential for experimentation!
