by The wingtacular is coming up in a couple of weeks and I wanted to give a little help to the competitors. The basis of any good wing sauce is a good hot sauce. Over the counter hot sauces are good, but if you make your own you can control the ingredients and the amount of heat. As always, nothing compares to homemade.
I went to the local grocery store last night looking for a nice mix of peppers to create my hot sauce. The main problem was that they were extremely limited in their selection. So for this hot sauce I am making a green hot sauce. It still has the spiciness that I look for in a hot sauce but it has a different color and more of an earthiness to it.
Hot Sauce
- 1 lb of your favorite peppers. (traditional sauces use either a cayenne pepper or the tabsco pepper as the base. Then you can add a habenero or a scotch bonnet to perk up the spice.)
- White vinegar – just enough to cover the peppers in your blender.
- 5 tsp salt
Cut off the stems of your peppers. I would recommend wearing rubber gloves. As always I failed to have gloves and now whenever I touch my eyes they burn. The capsicum takes a long time to get off the fingers. It has been almost 18 hours since I made the sauce and I am still unable to touch my face. At this point you can remove the seeds from the peppers if you wish. I like my hot sauces hot enough to make you sweat when you just think of them, so I leave the seeds in. Later on we will strain the seeds out so don’t worry about having a chunky sauce.
Add the peppers and salt to your blender. Then fill the blender with enough vinegar to cover the peppers. It took me about 2 cups to cover 1 lb of peppers. Then blend on high until smooth. I have an older blender and I had to stop and scrape the blender a couple of times. If you have a fancy new blender then this will only take about 3 minutes of blending. My blender took about 10.Â
Once you have a fully blended mixture add it to a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Then let it simmer for 15 to 20 minutes. This step will perfume your house in the scent of super spicy vinegar. Not the best scent but totally worth it.
After 15 -20 minutes your sauce will reduce a bit. Remove from the heat and strain. Some people like to age their sauce with the seeds and then strain afterwards, but I find it easier to strain when the sauce is hot.Â
Once you strain your sauce place it in a glass container and let it sit in your refrigerator. You will notice over the next week that some of the vinegar is floating to the top. This is good. After about a week separate the vinegar that is floating from the sauce. You can either use a spoon or even a gravy separator if you have one on hand. Now you can bottle your sauce or keep it in the glass container that you aged it in.Â
Helpful Hint: If you go to TJ Maxx, Marshalls or Home Goods, they have bottles all over the place that you can get for rather cheap. Hot sauce makes a great gifts. Nothing says congratulations or I love you more than making someone cry from the spiciest hot sauce in the world.
Fun recipe. I made the foolish decision last year to plant a habenero pepper plant and ended up with about a bazillion peppers. IF that ever happens again I should definitely just make hot sauce.
I did that too. I planted habeneros and scotch bonets and ended up with 60-70 peppers. Way too much. I think that next time I might make a habenero jelly. I will send the recipe along if I end up making it.
-rex
I roast my peppers over hardwood along with deseeded tomatoes and cilantro to make a scorched salsa version. It is sinfull!
your sauce looks wonderful, looks very tasty, my question is what are you doing with the strained mash? hope it is not going down the drain, you can add more vinegar & water, boil and make more sauce!
@tony – I like to take the remains and add sesame oil to it. I tried to reuse it a second time and it failed to be as spicy as I wanted it. So now I throw it into a jar add sesame oil and then use it for stir frys. It makes a nice and spicy oil.
How long can this stay good in the fridge?
As long as you use a vinegar with at least 5% acidity you should be safe from any botulism. Vinegar naturally cures foods and prevents the growth of bacteria. Standard household white vinegar is 5%. My hot sauce does not usually last more than a couple of months, But I had one in my fridge for 6 months and it was just as good as the day that I made it. Plenty of time to make it through the winter.
I just made 3 quarts of this sauce and it smells and tastes fantastic! Thank you very much for sharing the recipe. I look forward to enjoying hot sauce with home grown peppers all winter now.
Phoo-d – Glad you enjoy it. It is the best in bloody mary’s.
Rex
Thanks a lot for some good tips. I look forward to reading more on the topic in the future. Keep up the good work! This blog is going to be great resource. Love reading it.
Howdy! Quick question that's totally off topic. Do you know how to make your site mobile friendly? My weblog looks weird when browsing from my iphone 4. I'm trying to find a theme or plugin that might be able to resolve this issue. If you have any recommendations, please share. Cheers!
One suggestion: Mine kept settling into clear and sediment … Not so attractive. I checked the labels of store brand sauces and found that they also use Xanthan gum (whole Foods) as a natural emulsifier. added a very small amount per the instructions (about 1/16th teaspoon per cup) of Xanthan gum powder during blending and now the sauce stays together perfectly … Like magic!
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