I have dried my chilies with an electric pizza oven (A large deep toaster oven) on the first really cold day or night of the season. Hours of low temperature drying fills the air with wonderful peppery scent and it helps a little with heating the house.
We dry all kinds of peppers...hot and sweet, and sometimes mixing them. Banana peppers (Sweet) actually make a really good tasting chili powder for soups and stews when we're feeding family who cannot eat hot peppers.
What I would like to try in November and December this year is drying peppers using a heavy metal barrel smoker with indirect heat using oak for some, pecan, and mesquite for others. I wish we could use juniper wood, but I've read there are dangerous pathogens in Juniper (Or what we call Cedar).
There are a lot of ways to make dried peppers. Enjoy them all.
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